“Everyone was a machine.” But, you know, in a good way. With Pep Guardiola this is always going to be meant as a positive thing, a sign of a team starting to fizz.
These are benevolent machines: not so much joyless droid-football, more perfectly functioning jam factory assembly line, interlocking units, systems in perfect concert. A chess computer playing padel against a chess computer, coached by 25 even more powerful chess computers. A conversation about Bauhaus architecture in a New York food-science restaurant where dessert is a cube of fibreglass flambéed at your table by a hologram.
Something like that anyway. It is acceptable to get a little carried away, a little purple prose at the spectacle of a high-functioning Guardiola team. If only because Guardiola himself is such a paradox.
Here we have the ultimate control coach, whose ideal game of football is the million-man midfield plus infinite possession, but who is simultaneously gripped by an almost comical degree of unfiltered passion, leaping on the touchline, carving wild human shapes in the air with his cold metal robot hands.
Either way machine-level excellence was clearly a theme of the post-match chat in a very happy Manchester City dressing room after a fine, fluid 3-0 win against a non-fine, non-fluid Manchester United last weekend.
Guardiola’s eyes boggled with pleasure as he spoke about the relentlessness of his players. “Erling is a machine,” was Jérémy Doku’s verdict after Erling Haaland had scored two fine goals and in between spent much of the game running over the various portions of sullen human flesh acting as the United defence.
Although, arguably, the parts that stood out most were when Haaland was less not more of machine, and in ways that may – repeat: this was against the outdated software, the systems crash of Amorim-era United – point to a change in City’s attacking patterns.
The usual elite Haaland qualities were there. The sniper’s eye. The miss-one-score-two fearlessness. The preternatural height-to-speed agility ratio, a physical gift, but one that also requires constant maintenance, aged 25, and is perhaps a little taken for granted in his fourth season at City.
It is easy to overplay the nature of the Haaland style. He remains an unusual elite footballer, albeit one who is either a single-cell Viking goal-zombie with the first touch of a League Two carpet-fitter; or the complete centre-forward every time he manages to complete a through ball.
But there was also a slight sense of pattern-shift to the way Haaland led City’s attacks, and an ominous note for Arsenal before Sunday’s unavoidably massive early season meeting at the Emirates. Liverpool play their home derby against Everton on Saturday. Their record in that fixture reads played 12 and lost one with an aggregate score of 24-7 over the past decade.
By the time Monday rolls around, defeat by City at home could leave Arsenal six points behind the champions before the early season fumblings have ironed themselves out. You can’t win the title in September. But you can do quite a lot to stop Arsenal from winning it.
And for Haaland in particular the chance to inflict a lung-crunching early body shot may just represent an interesting side-project. Is it personal with Arsenal now? Surely not. Football moves too quickly, players see each other constantly. There isn’t really time for genuine old-school grievances to fester. But it is also easy to forget that the last meeting of these teams in February was a strange occasion, a statement-style Arsenal result that ended up meaning very little, and also, in its optics, something of a grudge game.
A 5-1 Arsenal win could have felt like a corner turned given their poor league record against City across the entirety of the Guardiola mega-era. Five Arsenal players scored that day, including two teenagers. But what might have been a note of ignition became instead a moment of vertigo. Arsenal went out of the Carabao Cup three days later. The next home game was the 1-0 defeat by West Ham that killed the league season. After the City game they dropped 18 points in their next 12 games and were 10 off the top at the end.
Scroll back and the key snapshot that day was Myles Lewis-Skelly doing the Haaland yogic celebration after scoring, a follow-up to the “Who the fuck are you?” interplay between the two in the previous game at the Etihad. This is all fine, fun, normal stuff. Lewis-Skelly is a very good and confident young player. Haaland probably found it funny. All human life is banter now.
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Still, by the end Arsenal’s fans were definitely doing a sarcastic Poznan, with a vague sense of suspended disbelief around the ground. Yes, you’re nine points ahead of your closest recent rivals. But this was actually the chance to win the league in City’s season of drop-off. And Haaland now has the opportunity to open another chapter in a game that actually does count for something, going into which he is also in a rare run of form.
His current goalscoring run is modern-football craziness: 18 in his past 14 games from May to September, scored across four competitions against opponents from eight countries. We can probably say it now. This guy, well, this guy knows how to do this.
Haaland has also been playing a little differently, at least at certain times and against the right opponents. In the Manchester derby he had 31 touches, five of which were shots, six headed clearances. His control has just got better, his passing quicker and more City-like.
This should happen. He is being coached by Guardiola every week. But there is also a sense the team shape and the available spaces have shifted a little. Two things were apparent on Sunday. First Haaland dropped deeper, linking the transitions well. Late in the second half he took the ball in the centre circle, sniped into space and nudged a perfect pass to put Tijjani Reijnders in on goal, De Bruyne-style.
And second, he got to run at the centre-backs, using his speed facing goal as a weapon as it was in his Borussia Dortmund years. Even his close-range opener had him running away from a mildly interested Luke Shaw, before producing a super-delicate finish. His second involved romping like a wild mustang from halfway. And yes, outpacing Harry Maguire over 40 yards may be the elite football equivalent of defeating a pot plant in a bare knuckle fist fight, but the finish also had a lovely air of inevitability.
Haaland is just very, very good at this, in a way that has at times got lost in City’s blitz attack. It helps to have the right opponents. United’s centre-backs repeatedly stepped up to fill holes left by an outmanoeuvred central pivot, leaving gaps to sprint into, another example of how easy it is to plan against a manager who tells you exactly what he’s going to do every time.
Haaland could be in his familiar pared-back form against Arsenal, who have excellent, mobile centre-backs and a swarming midfield block. But he has also produced outstanding all-round games against the same opponents, most notably in the 3-1 win in February 2023.
And on days like these he really can look, not just like an actual centre-forward, but like the best centre-forward in Europe. For Arsenal he presents a highly motivated note of danger in a game that already feels like an eliminator for the right to chase Liverpool through the autumn.