Perhaps this is just what happens when a team gets into the habit of winning: they keep on winning. They don’t have to dominate, they don’t have to carve out dozens of chances, they don’t have to hold possession for hours at a time. They just have to be, and by the quality of their being, they find goals when they need them.
Manchester City aren’t Real Madrid, not quite. They’re not yet able to doze away from kick-off, watching idly on as the opposition squander a handful of chances before, yawning, taking the first chance that comes their way. But equally they have gone 32 games unbeaten since the defeat at Aston Villa in December without being anywhere near the exceptional standards they set last season. Having exceptional players capable of turning games in a moment really helps.
One of them, Phil Foden, was named Football Writers’ Player of the Year this week, due reward for a season in which he has reached new levels of maturity and influence. He is still only 23, but the days when there were fears that Pep Guardiola was holding him back by not fully trusting him seem a long, long time ago. Even his cheeky scamp performance away to Atlético Madrid the season before last, gamesmanship with a grin, seems another age. Foden is a senior player these days and plays with the responsibility that goes with that status.
Another, Erling Haaland – last season’s FWA player of the year – has been out of sorts, at least by his own absurdly high standards, since returning from a foot injury at the end of January, scoring four goals in his first nine league appearances back. The issue of his lack of involvement in general play raised its head again. And it’s not unproblematic to have a player who engages so little if he’s not also scoring.
But, just as the run-in has reached its critical point, Haaland is scoring again. He had the fewest touches of any City outfielder again on Saturday, but nobody was fretting about that because four of them brought goals. That’s seven now in his last four outings, one of which was off the bench. His form has returned and that is very ominous for the title race.
The fourth goal in particular suggested his confidence; he is once again reaching the levels he did last season when he started to threaten records set by Dixie Dean and George Camsell. His touch after taking down Foden’s pass wasn’t great but it didn’t matter; he brushed aside Maximilian Kilman and thumped a shot past José Sá with the ease of a grown-up in the schoolyard. This was the Haaland of old, a creature built on a different scale to most humans, looking for all the world as though he’d been stitched together from the discarded parts of legends of the past then brought to life in a tower at midnight.
It’s true that two of his goals were penalties, the first pretty soft. But the second of them, the hat-trick goal, was brought about by Haaland’s bullocking surge through the middle, Nélson Semedo’s clumsy lunge into his standing leg born of desperation. His second goal, though, was perhaps of more significance: Rodri’s cross was floated beyond the back post where Haaland rose above Semedo and guided a majestic header back across goal and in at the far post. It was the goal of an old-fashioned English No 9, a Tommy Lawton, a Nat Lofthouse, an Andy Carroll, not of somebody who hadn’t scored with his head since the Manchester derby in October.
Yet the oddity is that when Haaland scored that header, City weren’t playing especially well. They were giving the ball away a lot and there was a half sense that Wolves, goaded into action by the early penalty against them, might get back into it. It wasn’t quite like last week at the City Ground, when Nottingham Forest were very clearly on top before Haaland came off the bench to make the game safe with a crisply taken second, but City weren’t entirely comfortable. It happened again when Hwang Hee-chan pulled one back for City. They weren’t nervous exactly, but the game didn’t feel over at that point: a minute later, it did.
The upcoming games at Fulham and Tottenham always looked more testing for City as they close in on a fourth successive title but this, in the end, was an emphatic dismissal of a team who had beaten them earlier in the season. A towering header, two penalties, one won with a surging run, a brutal fourth … it’s safe to say Haaland is back. And when he’s in that sort of form, the team behind him doesn’t have to be playing with the slick cohesion of which it is capable. They get dragged to excellence anyway.
