If Erling Haaland has a bad game it can look like two different things.
The first is the one that he generally had last season, or like he had at Arsenal before the international break. It is when people count the number of touches he has and say he did not get involved in the game enough. But broadly speaking that is not his fault.
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There is another type of bad Haaland game, though, and it has crept in a little bit this season. He may have had few touches, fine, but more worrying is that he has had chances inside the box but missed them.
His two goals for Norway against Cyprus during the international break — the first of which was a turning, swivelling rocket of a shot — prove that he has not lost his touch, and that makes a recent comment from Pep Guardiola all the more important to highlight.
“My advice is: don’t criticise Erling too much,” he said last month. “Criticise the full-back, the central defender or the manager, but never, never the striker who has scored all those goals because he will (score) and then you will be in a position where you have to apologise to him.”
That was eight games into the season and some very specific stats had been put to Guardiola as part of the question. After the first eight games of last season, Haaland had scored 12 goals, converting 60 per cent of his Opta-defined ‘big chances’. At that stage this season he had scored eight goals — not a big difference, it was noted — but his big chance conversion dropped to 29 per cent, and he had just missed nine big chances against Red Star Belgrade and West Ham United in his two previous games alone.
As Guardiola warned, Haaland scored against Nottingham Forest the very next day — with a tinge of relief about his celebration — but the overall numbers do not compare well to last season either: after 11 games this season, he has eight goals (which is still the most in the Premier League, it must be said) but has missed 14 out of 20 big chances. This time last year he had 19 goals, putting away 71 per cent of his big chances.
The last three games before the international break highlight the two types of ‘bad game’ he can have. In Premier League defeats to Wolves and Arsenal, he was starved of service, not receiving any big chances at all. In fact, he only had one shot across both games and that was against Wolves.
It should be obvious that having few touches in a game is mostly a reflection of his team’s performance rather than his own, but that is not always the conclusion. In the middle of another Haaland answer during that pre-Forest press conference, Guardiola made this point well.
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“He has had a lot of chances and that means we are playing good,” he said. “When I have the sense that the team is playing quite good it is (because of) how many chances Erling has. When he does not have many chances, something wrong is happening in our process, in our dynamic.”
That was patently the case against Wolves and Arsenal. But sandwiched in between those games was a fine 3-1 victory at RB Leipzig, which was much more like it in terms of City’s performance. They contained the German side’s counter-attacking threat, by and large, and they created plenty of chances, including for Haaland.
But it was another of those games that have crept in this season where he looked a little out of sorts. He had two of those early in the season against Sheffield United and West Ham, but it did not matter too much in the end because City won and he eventually scored anyway.
In between those two games, he looked off the pace against Fulham, and even the assist he got in the first half was an awkwardly dragged shot. Just as those thoughts were beginning to percolate, though, with memories of missed chances against Newcastle thrown into the mix, he suddenly scored a hat-trick.
It is a mug’s game, then, to talk about Haaland as anything less than a goalscoring machine, because even when he looks a little off he is going to get chances and he is probably going to put one of them away.
But it is noticeable when he is struggling, and not just because he broke so many records and looked so breathtaking last season. His primary role in the City team, by far, is scoring goals and so when he is not doing it, or at least not to the level of last season, the effects are more exaggerated — he just looks much worse because there is not a lot of obvious other contributions.
Ironically, Guardiola’s warning also works in reverse: a left-back or a manager might get away with a bad performance but if Haaland is not doing his one job then he looks like a spare part.
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The other obvious thing he has to do in terms of contact with the ball is to drop outside the box and link up with his team-mates and, compared to the extremely high level of his team-mates, he looks a little more rigid than most, even when he is doing well.
This season he has provided a fine assist for Julian Alvarez against Red Star that any striker would be proud of, but he has also seemed sloppy with his contributions closer to the halfway line in a lot of games, adding to that sense that he is a little off-colour.
It is entirely understandable if his remarkable form of last season has dipped a little and, to reiterate, he is still the league’s top scorer.
But it is worth highlighting now because City play against Brighton, Manchester United, Bournemouth, Chelsea, Liverpool, Tottenham and Aston Villa in their next seven games, and Haaland’s contributions will be vital (as long as his team-mates find him, of course).
Nobody would be surprised if he were to score another hat-trick against Brighton — or against any of those teams, in fact — and Guardiola would have been proven right again.
If nothing else, it is an interesting scenario to keep an eye on.
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(Top photo: George Wood/Getty Images)