There is an insouciance to the way Erling Haaland makes the miraculous look mundane. Each week of his maiden Manchester City campaign\u00a0has furnished a fresh distinction, from becoming the first Premier League player to score hat-tricks in three successive home games to reaching 13 goals in the Champions League knockout stages, the same total as Thierry Henry managed over an entire career. At just 22, the Norwegian is the ultimate accumulator of accolades. Even Shirley Temple, who won her first and only Academy Award aged six, seems a slouch by comparison.<\/p>\n

And yet the most luminous debut season in living memory still needs two further flourishes. Over the next eight days, Haaland still requires FA Cup and Champions League glory before he can truly be said\u00a0to have completed English football in his first year. If you examine his body of work so far, a disjuncture emerges between his multiplying individual awards and his relatively slender haul of team honours. The league title that he did so much to secure for City sat in contrast to his restless quest for silverware at Borussia Dortmund, where, courtesy of Bayern Munich\u2019s dominance, 2\u00bd spectacular seasons yielded just one German Cup.<\/p>\n

Haaland looks to City to propel him to the greatness he craves. Where Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo could augment their CVs at the international level, he is unlikely ever to enjoy the same luxury of representing Norway. Realistically, he needs to win the Champions League in Istanbul to stand any hope of denying Messi, still bathed in World Cup afterglow, an eighth Ballon d\u2019Or. It is why his first FA Cup final assumes such magnitude: for Haaland, emblem of the post-Messi generation, everything is predicated on the club, not a country.<\/p>\n

Fittingly, he performs like somebody without a moment to waste, transforming himself from a gangly \u201cpiece of spaghetti\u201d, to borrow one childhood coach\u2019s unflattering portrayal, into a veritable Norse god of a striker. Haaland was already in a hurry at Dortmund, where, in his first match against Augsburg, he scored with his third touch. A little under 23 minutes later, he had a hat trick. The same nonchalant, warp-speed rise has been witnessed at City. All those predictions he might toil to make an instant transition from the Bundesliga? He scored nine in his first five Premier League games.<\/p>\n

It is Haaland\u2019s capacity to shrug off even the most oppressive expectations that make his signing by City the coup of the century. He is that supreme rarity of a fully-fledged star, not some callow wunderkind or a rough-hewn jewel who needs Pep Guardiola\u2019s polish to sparkle in his second season, in the manner of Jack Grealish. Here you are looking at one piece of treasure with no discernible flaw. For all the attempts to force comparisons between Haaland and Harry Kane, the only other player to hit the 30-goal mark in the Premier League this season, City\u2019s insatiable centre-forward amassed his 36 in six fewer hours of football.<\/p>\n

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