On a cool spring afternoon thick with thwarted hopes, Gabriel and Saliba became the first centre-back partnership in the Premier League to restrict Haaland to zero shots on target twice in the same season. In fact, if you add in last summer’s Community Shield, they have managed it three times this campaign, across more than four hours of football. Roy Keane, frankly, had endured enough. “The level of his general play is so poor,” he said. “In front of goal, he’s the best in the world, but in his general play he’s almost like a League Two player. That’s the way I look at it. He has to improve his all-round game.”
Even by the standards of Keane’s acid tongue, it was scalding. Haaland, let us not forget, torched records for fun in his debut season, reaching 50 top-flight goals in 17 fewer games than any player since the Premier League’s inception. There is an argument that only the unending adoration of Lionel Messi, far from the game’s epicentre in Miami, prevented him from winning the Ballon d’Or. Is it truly legitimate for a former Manchester United captain to be denigrating him, a few months later, as some fourth-tier trundler?
Keane’s prime objective, clearly, is to provoke. But his sheer bewilderment at Haaland’s ineffectual performance was shared all around the Etihad. With six minutes left, his moment arrived, as Kevin De Bruyne’s outswinging corner was headed across the face of goal by Josko Gvardiol and into his path. Except four yards out, he connected only with thin air. Until recently, such a howler would have been unthinkable from this centre-forward extraordinaire. Now, though, at the very moment when City should be shifting up through the gears, Haaland is stuck stubbornly in neutral.
