As the drama reached its conclusion, Erling Haaland was not where he wanted to be. Manchester City’s No 9, their regular penalty-taker and Golden Boot winner, was off the pitch, unable to change anything as his night turned into a personal ordeal.
He stood, for the most part, just behind the line of City substitutes, coaches and staff who had gathered, arm in arm, alongside the side of the pitch to watch the penalty shootout against Real Madrid.
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Every so often, Haaland moved forward to join the line, hopping up and down, shouting words of encouragement. But then he would break away again, exhibiting all the symptoms of a footballer who was not enjoying the mix of stress and helplessness: head down, pacing anxiously, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his tracksuit top.
These are the nights, after all, when the elite players, the genuine A-listers — of which Haaland is definitely one — like to remind us why, at the highest level, they usually flourish. When the heat of the battle rises dangerously close to intolerable, those players are the ones who, more often than not, come into their own.
Just look at Jude Bellingham’s contribution in the build-up to the opening goal from Rodrygo and a touch from the heavens to bring down the ball and set up the decisive attack. Bellingham followed up that piece of brilliance by scoring Real Madrid’s second penalty with the expertise he demonstrated all night, as though bemused that anyone might be impudent enough to suspect a player with his gifts would even contemplate letting City off the hook.
Haaland, on the other hand, had only 21 touches of the ball before being substituted at the 90-minute mark. He completed five passes (below), which seems almost implausible given the sheer volume of City’s pressure. In total, City put together 846 passes, yet none came from Haaland until the 37th minute.
He had five shots, though only one on target, and there was a first-half header that looped against the crossbar. So it would not be true to say that Haaland never threatened Madrid’s goal. But Pep Guardiola was being kind when he said City had “played exceptional in all departments”. They came up short inside the penalty area and, to be fair to Guardiola, he did acknowledge that point in his post-match analysis.
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Over the two legs, Haaland managed two shots on target and lost possession more times (14) than the number of occasions (11) when he found a team-mate with the ball. He touched the ball nine times in the penalty area (below) but was unable to make them count. It was unusual to see him so ineffective and City fans could be forgiven for expecting better when, for the most part, they are used to a different version of Haaland.
At the final whistle, that meant Haaland being reduced to the role of chief sympathiser. The first player he approached was Bernardo Silva, kissing him on the side of his head and offering whatever consoling words he could come up with for one of the two City players whose penalties were saved.
Haaland made a beeline to the second one, Mateo Kovacic, and then returned to Bernardo to chaperone him off the pitch, an arm around his shoulder. When a television crew strayed too close, Haaland pushed the camera away to spare his team-mate the intrusion.
Guardiola explained afterwards that Haaland had asked to “go out” of the game — the striker felt like he had nothing in the tank for extra time. The same, according to City’s manager, applied to Kevin De Bruyne, who was substituted in the 112th minute, meaning City went into a penalty shootout without the two players who would have been their safest bets to beat Andriy Lunin, the Madrid goalkeeper.
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Haaland has scored 42 out of his 47 career penalties, De Bruyne has nine from 11. None of us will ever know whether their presence might have changed anything, but it is tempting to think it might have. Kovacic, for one, might have been taken off City’s list of five penalty-takers.
Unfortunately for City, De Bruyne and Haaland have experienced injury issues this season and, fitness-wise, perhaps it caught up with them at just the wrong time.
If so, perhaps it could be asked why Guardiola started with them both in the 5-1 win against Luton Town that fell in between the two legs of this quarter-final. Could they have been rested against the Premier League’s 18th-placed team? You have to conclude that, yes, they probably could have.
Something was not right with Haaland anyway, even if the point remains that it is difficult to be too critical of a striker who has greedily accumulated 83 goals and counting in his first two seasons in City’s colours.
Haaland, we keep being told, is not having such a great season and maybe that is true, to some extent, in the context of his record-breaking first year in Manchester — but then you see he has 31 goals this season.
At the same time, there is no doubt he is going through a difficult, stodgy period and, on current form, it is not easy to locate the precious magic that helped him obliterate so many defences last season.
Roy Keane went too far, as often happens, when he described Haaland recently as looking like a League Two player. A more accurate assessment is that Haaland is a great scorer — one of the greats, evidently — but not always a great footballer in other aspects of his play. There are imperfections. Yes, the good clearly outweighs the bad, but he does not want these peripheral performances to become a recurring theme, especially on the occasions that grab the attention of the entire football world.
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Closer analysis shows he has not scored in four games against Madrid. He has never got the better of Antonio Rudiger in particular and, on a wider level, Haaland has not scored in a semi-final or final for the treble winners. Not yet, anyway.
It might feel like nit-picking, but surely the big players are meant to shape the big games. This was the biggest of them all for City this season and the best part of Haaland’s night came before kick-off when he was presented with his golden boot for finishing as the leading scorer in last year’s competition.
Luis Figo handed it over, Haaland smiled for the cameras, then the trophy was put away for safekeeping. For a player of Haaland’s achievements, it will have felt like a consolation prize by the end of the night, watching from the edges, devoid of any real influence and no longer, perhaps, seeming quite so superhuman.
(Top photo: Darren Staples/AFP via Getty Images)
