When you are as good as Erling Haaland is, the eyes will always be on you and the prying eyes will catch you each time you falter. The Norwegian phenom has been nothing short of extraordinary since his arrival to the blue side of Manchester.
One simply doesn’t score 52 goals in 53 games and win the treble in his very first season. What sounds more insane is the fact that Haaland was the top goal scorer in both the Premier League (36) and the Champions League (12).
But strangely, it is not his freakish goal-scoring that is trending right now, probably because people have simply gotten used to it. It is his exploits in the training pitch that has gotten the attention of the netizens.
The footage from Manchester CIty’s practice session before their high profile UCL clash against Real Madrid, Haaland was seen selecting his rondo team and he chose to push Rodri, Doku and Stones out, literally forbidding them from participating in the session. Considering that these three are the most important supply lines to him in important matches, the obvious question that one may ask is, “Why?”
If you have not been living under a rock, you’d have definitely seen the video of Haaland in a rondo session in the previous week. The video showed the human side of the otherwise ‘robot’.
You could see him struggle with the passes whenever he was caught in a tight spot. Since none of the top defenders could find his weakness, Haaland himself had to step in.
There were three teams in it and Haaland and Rodri were in the same team. Stones was in a different one. While Stones and Rodri looked immensely composed on the ball and knew exactly when to intercept and pass, Haaland struggled with his control and had to make way too many movements for his liking. And with the level of ball control Doku has, it is not a far stretch to feel that he is a bully in rondo as well.
The internet was not kind to the 23-year-old. From drawing parallels with Leo Messi to denouncing his ‘super striker’ tag, the jeers knew no bounds. While there were the occasional “don’t judge him by his training pitch performance” comments, they were too few and far between. The age-old saying, “People like to see heroes fail” couldn’t be more true.
As a result, the striker made sure to not end up as a laughing stock and did it in the most Haaland-way possible. He straight up booted the ‘problem elements’ from the session. In fact, Phil Foden helped him push Stones away. At last, he decided to keep Ruben Dias and Julian Alvarez in the team apart from Foden.
Haaland just wanted to reduce the difficulty level of the session. You can’t blame a man for asking for a bit of relaxation when he eats records for breakfast and trophies for lunch now, can you?
