Everybody has a plan until Erling Haaland charges at them. Familiarity, perhaps, has dulled in Premier League minds just what a terrifying prospect he is, nearly 90kg of Norwegian muscle capable of moving at ferocious speeds yet blessed as well with a deft touch and a range of finishes. Manchester United couldn’t stop him, and neither could Napoli. Even when Haaland isn’t scoring he is spreading terror.
Giovanni Di Lorenzo is an experienced defender. He is the Napoli captain. He has won half a century of caps for Italy. But when Phil Foden – the signs of rejuvenation he showed on Sunday happily maintained against Napoli – slipped an angled pass through the back four after 21 minutes, Di Lorenzo, presumably aware of the presence of Haaland and worried about the unstoppable force he represents when he gets going, stepped across his line.
But in doing so he misjudged the path of the ball and as it ran away from him, he had Haaland not over his right shoulder where he had feared him, but over his left. Panicking, he lunged, missed and caught Haaland’s shin. The red card was obvious once the video assistant referee had shown there was no toe on the ball.
Before that, although City had had 69% of the ball, the game seemed finely poised. Napoli’s midfield, with Kevin De Bruyne added to the title-winning trio of Stanislav Lobotka, Frank Zambo Anguissa and Scott McTominay, hadn’t actually created anything, but there had been a distant threat that at some point they might. After the dismissal, it was attack against defence and City had 77% possession.
A coach, Antonio Conte has always said, is like a tailor; he must cut his cloth accordingly. For most of his career, he preferred a back three, pressed high and practised automisations – set moves drilled over and over again until, even in the heat of battle, players can perform them instinctively.
When he arrived at Napoli, though, he inherited – via a series of missteps that saw Rudi Garcia, Walter Mazzarri and Francesco Calzona all have the job in 2023-24 – the fluid 4-3-3 that had brought the title under Luciano Spalletti. Until January he also had Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, their brightest creative talent, who could not realistically be repackaged as either a wing-back or a central attacker.
So Conte adapted to circumstance, playing something somewhere between a 4-3-3 and a 4-2-2-2, with McTominay pushing forward on the left and Matteo Politano on the right, and a front two of Giacomo Raspadori and Romelu Lukaku. Raspadori has gone to Atlético, while Lukaku has suffered a serious thigh injury, but in have come De Bruyne and Rasmus Højlund. The 4-3-3 has become 4-1-4-1, although with the midfield four offering more width on the right than the left, and De Bruyne given a degree of freedom.
But Haaland can undo the best of plans. Faced with a flaw, down to 10 men, the tailor had to adjust his patterns. And Conte is a ruthless tailor; he has no time for sentiment, so off came the returning hero.
De Bruyne may be the imaginative brain of the side, but he carried with him the sense of luxury. At 34, he is no longer equipped for the chasing and tracking of playing against City a man down. There had been banners celebrating him before kick-off and when he was substituted after 26 minutes there were great cheers from the home fans, tinged, no doubt, with a sense of relief. After watching him for a decade, they know the damage he can still do.
There were three former Manchester United players on the Napoli side, but only two, McTominay and Højlund, drew much attention in the buildup. It was the third, the shaven-headed, neck-tattooed, bearded Serbian goalkeeper Vanja Milinkovic-Savic, though, who for a time looked like being the decisive presence.
He was 17 when he joined United from Vojvodina in 2014, but he stayed in Novi Sad on loan for an additional year and, after failing to secure a work permit, was sold to Lechia Gdansk. He joined Napoli on loan from Torino in the summer and was playing only because of Alex Meret’s groin injury. But he made three outstanding saves in the final 10 minutes of the first half, raising, briefly, the possibility that he might be the unlikely hero of a remarkable rearguard.
But in the end, even he had to succumb to Haaland, who ran on to a lofted Foden pass to shape a clever header over the big Serbia international.
That is six goals for Haaland in five games for City this season in a period when he also became only the second man ever to score five in an international game for Norway. It is only by his remarkable standards that the 22 league goals he got last season could be called a downturn.
But as Pep Guardiola, clutching his wrist warmly, led him off the field after the final whistle, it seemed safe to say that Haaland is back.
