Man City Close In on Arsenal as Only Real Premier League Title Challengers
To be fair, Pep Guardiola later expressed regret and apologised for calling Tottenham “the Harry Kane Team.”
This is actually fortunate since, more than ever, if his most recent version of Manchester City is to succeed this season, it will be as the Erling Haaland Team.
Considering his goal-scoring prowess throughout his first few seasons in Manchester, he is now the team’s sharp end to a considerably greater extent than ever before.
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However, Guardiola is relying on and playing to the qualities of his most powerful weapon with joyful relish this season in a new-look, post-De Bruyne City.
He contributed to 13 of City’s 19 Premier League goals this season when he scored his second goal in the first half of a superb 3-1 victory over a strong Bournemouth team.
Both goals are the kind of quick-breaking one-on-ones that you just never expect him to miss.
Unfortunately, Haaland fell back below the two-thirds mark after Nico O’Reilly’s deft goal after halftime gave the score much-needed consolation.
At least it was O’Reilly’s first Premier League goal of the year, but Maxime Esteve’s own goals continue to be City’s second-leading scorer, currently 11 behind Haaland.
Haaland now has a seven-goal advantage over all-comers this season. With 13 more goals than half of the league’s teams have managed thus far, no one else in the division has even half of his total.
The degree to which City currently depends on Haaland’s talent for the ridiculous raises legitimate problems.
In the two Premier League games he hasn’t scored in, against Spurs early in the season and Villa last week, City has finished without a point or goal.
However, playing any other manner would appear like a deliberate act of contrarianism when he is in this mood.
In keeping with their overall start to the season, which had seen them undefeated since the first night at Liverpool, Bournemouth had gotten off to a strong start here.
Alan Smith was on Sky Sports commentary discussing how well the visitors had started until Haaland raced clear from his own half thanks to a header from Rayan Cherki.
Smith didn’t finish that phrase because he and everyone else in the stadium, including Djordje Petrovic and Haaland, were aware of how inevitable what was going to happen was.
From the moment Haaland’s first touch put the ball under his complete control with no loss of top speed, it was impossible to express how compelling that conviction felt. There was nothing that could be done to alter the course of events after that.
This was about as challenging as a one-on-one can get. A bouncing ball, a long run to goal where a less skilled striker can become distracted by their own thoughts, and defenders frantically attempting to re-enter the game.
There aren’t many strikers that we can think of right now that we would be sure to score in that kind of circumstance. However, the thought of Haaland taking any action at all seemed absurd.
The same thing happened with knobs on for a more difficult second opportunity fifteen minutes later and an unanticipated equaliser by Bournemouth.
City’s triumph over elite opposition reaffirms their status as Arsenal’s most likely and possibly only source of serious concern this season.
After 99 games, there is order at the top, with Arsenal, City, and Liverpool holding the top three spots in a clear order of merit. This has been a chaotic Premier League season.
Although Bournemouth’s loss today does not imply that they cannot continue to defy gravity under Andoni Iraola’s wise guidance, they are still interlopers in a top six that is completed by Spurs and Chelsea.
It was difficult to envision anyone else, possibly even Arsenal, winning so easily in the end against a display of such wit and determination from the visitors, which is part of what makes City’s victory so remarkable.
With the exception of the existence of a ludicrous and nearly unstoppable goalscoring robot, Bournemouth was equal to City in every regard, and Haaland was not simply the difference on the scoreboard.
This was undoubtedly a performance that would have been sufficient to give Bournemouth a victory against any team outside of the top three, and there is growing evidence that Bournemouth will undoubtedly defeat any team outside of the top three on a reasonably regular basis.
After the kind of player sales they had to put up with during the summer, they have performed miracles to be this excellent.
However, Iraola’s alchemy is unable to create a Haaland out of base metal. He continues to be the most valuable asset in the Premier League.
