Culture
The goals that show that Erling Haaland is an artist and not a robot
Erling Haaland is frequently portrayed as a lethal Scandinavian footballing machine whose sole purpose is to compute the most effective way to score goals.
It is a tempting way to describe a 6ft 4in (194cm) Norwegian whose goalscoring records are on another level — it’s now 97 goals in 102 appearances for Manchester City if you were wondering.
Most of Haaland’s goals for City are one-touch finishes inside the penalty area — a result of being in the right place at the right time. His exquisite off-ball movement means that he is usually in the correct position, and that is complemented by constant scanning of his surroundings.
They are the type of goals that present Haaland as an inevitable cyborg — but that’s not entirely fair. Looking past his clinical strikes opens up a rich seam of technique and artistry in Haaland’s finishing.
With seven goals in three Premier League games this season, Erling Haaland is… inevitable (James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images)
In his first season with City, Haaland scored only once from outside the penalty area, away to Wolverhampton Wanderers in September 2022. That’s not the significance of the goal though, because what he does is more important than where he does it.
Here, Haaland receives the ball with his left foot and it’s Maximilian Kilman up against him…
Kilman is expecting Haaland to shift the ball onto his stronger left foot, which is clear from the centre-back’s body shape. However, the City striker dummies a move towards his left foot…
… and then pushes the ball towards his right, which forces Kilman to change his body orientation by rotating clockwise…
… and losing sight of the ball for a moment.
That fraction of a second is enough for Haaland to strike the ball into the bottom corner.
Interestingly, he shoots towards the side from which Kilman has just rotated away. That makes the shot harder to block because the defender’s torque is moving him in the other direction.
Another feature of Haaland’s game that is often overlooked is his ability to use both feet to create the best shooting angle and finish chances quickly.
In this example, against Nottingham Forest last April, Kevin De Bruyne finds Haaland near the penalty area, and Murillo positions himself in a way that forces Haaland to go onto his weaker right foot. The City striker uses his left foot to dribble into space…
… but then quickly shoots with his right before Forest’s goalkeeper can close down the angle. In this instance, Haaland’s ability to use his left and right foot in conjunction allows him a less-than-a-second advantage compared to dribbling with his left and then shooting with the same foot.
In a much more recent example, against West Ham United last Saturday, Haaland is waiting to receive Rico Lewis’ pass inside the penalty area with Emerson Palmieri the closest defender to the City striker. Lewis plays the pass to Haaland…
… and Emerson moves towards him, but the Norwegian controls the ball with his right foot against the direction of the left-back’s movement…
… and curls it into the top of the net. Again, by receiving with his right and immediately shooting with his left Haaland saves a fraction of a second compared to only using his left foot.
Another key point here is that his first touch moves the ball against the direction of Emerson’s movement, which makes it harder to block the shot because the left-back’s body weight is residing on his left foot and he is trying to block with an unbalanced right.
Haaland takes a risk by controlling the ball back towards the centre, where there is less space, rather than letting the ball roll across him, because the first option provides a better shooting angle. And it works because he takes Emerson out by setting up the shot in the opposite direction of the left-back’s movement, in addition to the speed of the execution as a result of using both feet.
Whether Haaland controls the ball with his left or right foot depends on the situation and where he wants to shoot from. In this example, against Leicester City in April 2023, De Bruyne plays the ball into the path of Haaland on an attacking transition.
Against an unorganised defence, Haaland pushes the ball into space with his first touch by using his left foot to keep it away from Leicester’s central centre-back, Harry Souttar, and the goalkeeper…
… before dinking it over the latter to score yet another goal. The difference is minimal, but if Haaland uses his right foot to push the ball forward, there is a higher probability of it being closer to Souttar and the goalkeeper when he is taking the shot.
In another example, from the 1-1 draw against Liverpool in November, Haaland is positioned between Virgil van Dijk (No 4) and Joel Matip (No 32) when Nathan Ake plays the ball to him.
First, Haaland is positioned outside the goalposts when he receives the ball, which means that pushing it away from Van Dijk and Alisson with his left foot is a non-starter because the shooting angle is already narrow.
Instead, Haaland controls the ball with his right rather than his left to distance it from Matip and allow him to quickly use his left on the following action…
… in which he sets up the shot…
… and puts the ball into the far bottom corner.
The final example is from City’s 2-0 victory against Chelsea last month. Here, Bernardo Silva flicks the ball to Haaland inside the penalty area…
… and the Norwegian controls it with his right…
… but dribbles with his left instead of shooting…
… then uses his right again to be able to quickly shoot with his left…
… which he eventually does when he chips the ball into the back of the net.
The reason behind the delayed shot was that Haaland predicted that Robert Sanchez would stay on his line.
“Last year, Sanchez had a great save on me because he stays a lot on the line,” Haaland told Sky Sports after the game. “That’s why I took a couple of extra touches, then he was rushing out and I knew exactly what to do.”
More often than not, Haaland will score with a one-touch finish because he is in the ideal position and that’s all he needs to do. However, there will be other situations where more work is required and the City striker knows precisely what to do there, too.
Sometimes Haaland’s finishing might look robotic, but look a little closer and the artistry becomes clear.
(Top photo: Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images)
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
Take me to visit a dysfunctional family with oceanfront real estate
by Meg Mitchell Moore
Moore is a dependable ingredient in any summer reading soufflé. Her airy novels accomplish what they came to do: entertain and transport, without the pyrotechnics of, say, books that eschew quotation marks. In “Down With the Shipmans,” three sisters, laden with baggage, converge on their late mother’s beach cottage, only to learn that their father and his much younger wife are planning to sell the place.
The stakes are high, the drama is juicy and the views are sublime. Moore even provides two beach dogs — Leo (an unruly pit bull mix) and Cinnamon (“golden retriever, red bandanna, long pink tongue”) — to keep things lively. (Comes out June 2)
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