Time for Pep to sign pre-cooked prodigy Haaland

• Published date: 19 December 2020
• Date: 19 December 2020
• Author: Barney Ronay
• Publication title: Irish Times (Dublin, Ireland)

It is an addictive genre, with some highly informed writing and glimpses of the cutting edge of the modern game, but with the Pep Unpeeled stuff you know what you're really coming for. It's not the game-by-game or the tactical insights. It's the obsession stuff.

What I really want to hear is that on matchdays Guardiola eats only wood chippings and his own toenails. That he ran to Scarborough and back in a pair of blood-soaked espadrilles in order to process the pain of losing at Leicester. That he was physically sick the first time he saw Kyle Walker take a short corner in training and had to take a week in Belgium with Banksy and Stephen Hawking rewiring the left side of his brain.

This is not to mock Pep's magnificent obsession. Quite the opposite. Pep being mad about football is uplifting. It breathes life into the whole garish circus. Never changing, never taking a step from the light, on the touchline waving his fists at the sky. Pep must always be building a team to his own uncompromising blueprint, or the world becomes a slightly colder place.

Genius-ball

This is the jarring thing about Manchester City's progress this season. City are in a time of transition. They're still only a minor surge off the top of the table but there has been, of all things, a mildness. This City are more pragmatic, no longer wedded to some notion of through-the-roof genius-ball. They played a deep midfield shield at Old Trafford and took a point with a shrug.

There is nothing surprising in this. Guardiola is doing something new, trying to build a second champion team. Sometimes you just can't be transcendent.

With this in mind the talk that City may be in for Borussia Dortmund's Erling Braut Haaland is fascinating for reasons that go to the heart of the manager's arc and the City project itself.

The really striking part is Haaland himself. There are always prodigies and hot new talents.

And there's this, a 20-year-old whose attributes are startlingly complete. In the most obvious terms, Haaland is that rare thing, an out-of-scale athlete: a small man's agility and acceleration - he has an incredible 30m sprint - wrapped inside a large man's strength and reach.

Plus he has all the other stuff: high-grade touch, tactical brains and a basic joy in his own goal-a-game ruthlessness - all of this already stress-tested through the glare of elite European club football.

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