Gary Lineker has said that he has been amazed by one particular aspect of Erling Haaland’s game other than his goalscoring ability.
The striker started his second Premier League campaign with Manchester City by scoring two goals in their 3-0 win over Burnley.
Having scored 52 goals in 53 appearances last season, the 23-year-old has been the topic of discussion with one former Premier League striker, who has highlighted another side of Haaland’s game that he admires.
Lineker praises Haaland’s movement
Speaking in a recent edition of The Rest Is Football alongside Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, Lineker had this to say about Haaland when asked which current Premier League player he resembles the most.
He said: “He’s like a bigger, faster, better version of me.
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“Whenever I watch football, I generally watch it from a striker’s perspective in terms of their movement and when I watch games, I always look at where the striker is going to go and I always think ‘get in there,’ and every time I do it with Haaland, he does exactly what I think in terms of creating that space for himself.”
Bearing in mind how Lineker scored 131 goals in 202 combined games he played for Tottenham Hotspur, Everton and Leicester City, it’s safe to say that he knows what it takes to be a top striker in the top flight of English football.
With 36 of Haaland’s 52 goals from last season coming in the Premier League, the centre-forward ended up breaking numerous top-flight records in his debut campaign in England with Pep Guardiola’s side.
While the Norway international understandably gets headlines and gets spoken about due to his impressive goalscoring numbers, it’s nice to hear Lineker praising another side of Haaland’s game that doesn’t always get noticed.
Moving forward, if the City star can continue making good movements across the pitch and gets fed with goalscoring opportunities by his teammates, he’ll surely have a great chance of scoring as many goals as he did last season this time around.