Haaland has most important skill in the game

• Published date: 15 April 2024
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

“The level of his general play is so poor and not just today . . . He’s almost like a League Two player, that’s how I look at him . . . Being a brilliant striker is fantastic, but he has to improve his all-round game,” Keane said after Manchester City drew 0-0 with Arsenal

It was true that Haaland didn’t have his best game that day. Afterwards he posted on Instagram pictures of him being manhandled by Gabriel Magalhães, which gave you a sense of what he thought had been going wrong for him out on the field. The pundits overlooked all that to pour scorn on his substandard skills.

We all know what Keane was getting at. Haaland isn’t a beautiful footballer like Kylian Mbappé or either of the Ronaldos. He could spend hours every day for the rest of his career working on his technique and never get close to being like them.

The question is: who cares? Ever since he turned professional Haaland has been scoring goals at a pace nobody his age has ever scored them, not Mbappé, not Cristiano Ronaldo, not even Lionel Messi. He can only do one thing really well, it just happens to be the most important skill in the game.

Annoy him

Keane’s criticism might not affect Haaland in the sense of shaking his confidence but it would certainly annoy him. Players are acutely aware of what people are saying about them. This was, after all, the weekend in which Alejandro Garnacho made headlines by liking posts by Mark Goldbridge in which the Manchester United YouTuber suggested Garnacho had been harshly treated by Erik ten Hag.

With Haaland under fire for perhaps the first time in his career, it was touching to see the players of other leading Premier League clubs offering support to the embattled Norwegian by showing the sceptical world that scoring simple chances really isn’t that simple.

Last week Darwin Nuñez’s stuttering form caused a proliferation of social media clips compiling some of his best misses of the season. What impresses you watching these compilations is the way he has every type of miss in his locker: free headers, one-on-ones, open-goal tap-ins, penalties. People had often suggested Darwin was likely to miss “when he had too much time to think” but this body of work proves he is a miss-artist of stunning completeness and range.

He produced another huge miss in Liverpool’s 1-0 home defeat to Crystal Palace yesterday, but this time his team-mates seemed determined to match him: Curtis Jones, Mohamed Salah and Diogo Jota all producing spectacular misses when they...