A good pair of Leeds shorts can last forever
Haaland's serenity is frightening in certain lights, like the bloke sitting placid in his pub corner for years, who one day starts smashing pint glasses over his own head.
Erling Haaland must be the calmest dude in football, the solitary relaxer in a sport characterised in 2021 by bottomless screaming about nothing, everywhere, from social media to Sunday League. Only Erling doesn't take it so serious. He meditates! He gives monosyllabic replies to boring questions! He uses the Champions League anthem as his alarm sound! He whispers "Marching on Together" in Stuart Dallas' ear, just for the heck of it!
Compare his ultra-relaxed demeanour to Cristiano Ronaldo lining up a direct free-kick as if he's calculating the physics for a moon-shot designed by Helmut Newton, rather than Isaac, letting every camera linger before ballooning the ball way off towards Mars. Erling just grins and blasts the thing into the net. All of the fun and none of the fuss.
But Haaland's is a land of contrasts. Those blasts feel even more powerful emanating from his chilled out Yorks-Norse nature. He grins, he shrugs, then he charges down the pitch like a gruesome b-movie monster petrifying everybody in his path, shooting into goal by harnessing the force of the atomic explosion a frantic scientist said was the only way to stop him devastating the valley. When the Bundesliga restarted in May 2020, the mid-pandemic silence was broken by Haaland rattling Schalke's net with a noise like shaking chains. He danced through socially distanced celebrations and waved to where the fans should have been. "Why not?" was his reply about that.
His serenity is frightening in certain lights, like the bloke sitting placid in his pub corner for years, who one day starts smashing pint glasses over his own head.