Foot & Soccer Soccer Match Reports, Football News
Morning all.
I watched Man City beat Chelsea yesterday afternoon, a result I didn’t necessarily want to see but one Chelsea deserve for myriad reasons. Enzo as captain? Ugh. John Terry would have been proud. Anyway, Erling Haaland did what Erling Haaland does. He scored a goal, and statistically he’s ridiculous.
100 games, 91 goals, 15 assists, 9 hat-tricks. How can you argue with it? Yet, at one point early in the second half I had a look at the in-game stats and he had touched the ball just 5 times. To be fair, he got a bit more stuck in during the second half, and ended with 17 touches, still 6 fewer than Savinho who was taken off at half-time with an injury. His pass completion was 37.5%, which is so low that’s a figure you rarely see at the end of 90 minutes from a professional at this level – especially in a Pep Guardiola team where possession is ten tenths of the law.
It got me thinking about the ongoing discussion about Arsenal and whether we need a striker or not. For comparison, against Wolves on Saturday, Kai Havertz had 44 touches of the ball, completing his passes at 78%, and ended up with a goal and an assist. He did spend some of the final stages in midfield though, but I wondered about whether a striker is really what we need.
I’ve seen some people will say that ‘a Haaland’ (if you could even find one), wouldn’t be a good fit for a Mikel Arteta team, and I can see that point of view. The flip-side, of course, is that when you have a player who can do what he does, you make them fit. As Guardiola has done. Haaland is not a Pep player in any traditional sense, but his talent and quality is such that even the best managers, even the ones most wedded to their principles of play, have to compromise for the benefit of the team.
That said, I think the Norwegian is pretty unique in the modern game, and trying to find one like him just because that’s what City have is a fool’s errand. I know we went after Benjamin Sesko who –…
Source link : https://arseblog.com/2024/08/go-wide-2/
Author : arseblog
Publish date : 2024-08-19 05:47:11
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