Roy Keane is totally wrong on Erling Haaland and why he doesn’t need to emulate Harry Kane, writes IAN LADYMAN

By all accounts Real Madrid defender Antonio Rudiger was pretty pleased with the way he handled Manchester City‘s Erling Haaland in the Bernabeu on Tuesday night. 

Rudiger had talked up the battle beforehand and walked off the field believing he had won it. He must have overlooked the fact he was part of a defence that conceded three goals.

And this is the thing about football. It’s a team game and Haaland is an integral part of the best one in Europe. 

The chances are City will knock Real out of the Champions League for the second season running when the teams reconvene in Manchester next week and while Rudiger sits on the sofa in April and tells his friends about how good he is, Haaland will be one step away from successive final appearances.

We are getting ahead of ourselves. City are slight favourites for the tie but no more. 

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The point about Haaland remains, though. He hasn’t scored many goals recently – just one in his last five City games – and what we know about the Norwegian is that when he doesn’t score he can be pretty invisible.

It’s weird, for sure, how anonymous he can be. There is no mistaking that. Just 20 touches against Madrid in a high scoring game. 

I was at a Champions League match City dominated in Copenhagen in February when he touched the ball just eight times in the opening hour. It was hard not to notice.

But the truth is that City knew what they were getting when they signed Haaland from Borussia Dortmund two summers ago. They were paying for goals. 

More of them than any of us could ever have imagined, as it happened. Currently, his tally stands at 82 from 86 City starts. You may wish to read that line again.

Had Pep Guardiola and City’s football director Txiki Begiristain wanted a No 9 who also liked to drop deep and create, they would have thrown the kitchen sink at Tottenham for Harry Kane. 

Had they wanted a striker who would run channels and scare defences with speed, they could have tried for Son Heung-min from the same club. Both would have been super players at City.

But having never found a true replacement for Sergio Aguero, City’s football brains trust decided they wanted goals and nothing else. 

And those astonishing stats – allied with last year’s treble success and an assault on a repeat that remains very much alive this time round – would appear to suggest they got that one pretty much right.

Commenting recently on Haaland’s ineffectiveness in City’s 0-0 draw with Arsenal, Roy Keane (a former central midfield player) described the 23-year-old’s link-up play as being of League Two standard. 

Amusingly, that analysis is known to have upset Haaland’s father Alfie more than it did Erling himself. It seems that the Keane/Haaland beef of yore remains alive and well.

What was interesting about all that was that Keane was wrong anyway.

It’s not that Haaland doesn’t do link up play very well. He doesn’t really do it all and that is clearly to Guardiola’s instruction.

For all that City’s squad is packed full of clever, creative players, much of what their great coach requires and demands is very structured. 

Guardiola doesn’t do free flow football in the way, for example, Jurgen Klopp does at Liverpool. There is actually much more order to the way Guardiola teams play and Haaland’s role in the current model is very clear. 

Play on the shoulder of the two central defenders and get ready to come alive whenever the ball is played in front of you. 

We can say with confidence that this has worked pretty well over the season-and-three-quarters Haaland has spent in England.

Haaland does not drop in and seek the ball. He does not see himself as a link in the creative chain and that’s understandable in an environment in which players like Kevin De Bruyne, Bernardo Silva, Phil Foden, Jack Grealish and others are fulfilling that purpose already.

Haaland does occupy defenders, though. He commands physical and mental attention even when he doesn’t have the ball. 

The space that frees as a consequence for others is clear. His ability as a finisher, meanwhile, is peerless. 

Would Liverpool have beaten Manchester United last weekend had Haaland been in their team? Undoubtedly so.

Centre forwards are perhaps unfairly defined by numbers. They can occasionally mislead. But Haaland’s don’t. 

His longest scoring drought for City is five games. The last of those was the Champions League final against Inter in Istanbul last June. 

He didn’t touch the ball many times that night either and I am not sure that weighed particularly heavily on his mind as he bowed his head for his medal.

When Kylian Mbappe scored what would have been a huge goal for PSG in Dortmund last December, the semi-automated offside system used in the Champions League ruled it out without a minute. 

In England our VAR officials were still messing about with red lines and rulers. 

Now – belatedly – the Premier League’s clubs have voted to join the real world and it’s overdue. Goodbye A-level geometry, hello common sense. 

The clamour for young Kobbie Mainoo to start England’s European Championship campaign against Serbia in June continues to grow but it would appear Gareth Southgate has his reservations.

Asked about the Manchester United player after his starring role in England’s draw with Belgium last month, Southgate said: ‘He has that fearlessness to come in and the technical ability to receive, when pressed, and to find a pass to manipulate the ball in tight areas.

‘It gives us a profile of player we haven’t got. That’s hugely exciting.

‘But we are obviously a little bit more open with him in the team.’

It’s that last sentence that tells me Mainoo will not play in game one in Gelsenkirchen. 

It tells me that the England manager may well listen to his more conservative instincts when it comes to setting up his team for an opening game that, above all, must not be lost.

That will fuel Southgate’s critics and with good reason. There are times when courage can be a virtue.

However it is also worth noting that Mainoo, for all his clear potential and talent, is currently playing in a United midfield that consistently gets overrun, outplayed and out-thought by Premier League teams. 

As Gary Neville said after the draw with Liverpool, it is the United midfield three that represents the team’s greatest ongoing weakness.

Mainoo cannot be blamed for this alone. Bruno Fernandes and Casemiro are in there too and they have much more experience than the teenager. 

But Mainoo is part of that midfield and, as such, is part of a problem. Southgate will have noticed this, too.

Just after Manchester United had equalised against Liverpool at Old Trafford, the visiting team launched one of those counter attacks that so often looked likely to open up their opponents like a tin of beans but almost inevitably came to nothing.

On this occasion, the numerical overload ended with Darwin Nunez in possession at the far post.

The Liverpool forward could have shot. He could have laid a two-yard pass back inside to the unmarked Dominik Szoboszlai. Instead he drove the ball back across goal to absolutely nobody.

On a chaotic afternoon it was a defining moment, one that would have stopped United’s recovery in its tracks. 

But it didn’t happen because a young footballer about whom so much is talked failed to simply lift his head up and look.

Nunez is a player I would pay to watch. I have tipped him for great things on this page before and I stand by that. But my resolve is weakening.

If you aren’t doing some of the game’s basics by the age of 24 then when will you?