Not just a goal machine: New model Haaland can deliver early body blow to Arsenal

Striker is getting better in a changing Manchester City team and in the sort of goal form to strike fear even into Arsenal’s elite defence

GOAL MACHINE: Erling Haaland has showed he is improving in all areas in a changing Manchester City team. Pic: Michael Regan/Getty Images

“Everyone was a machine.” But, you know, in a good way. With Pep Guardiola this is always going to be meant as a positive thing, a sign of a team starting to fizz.

These are benevolent machines: not so much joyless droid-football, more perfectly functioning jam factory assembly line, interlocking units, systems in perfect concert. A chess computer playing padel against a chess computer, coached by 25 even more powerful chess computers. A conversation about Bauhaus architecture in a New York food-science restaurant where dessert is a cube of fibreglass flambéed at your table by a hologram.