You just have to hear from Pep and see how he spoke about Haaland after we played them. We didn’t nullify him, we nullified the team. And he still had his moments and an assist. I’m fairly convinced Pep saw in those games a guy who could be what Lewandowski was for him at Bayern.
Anyone who saw Haaland play under Marsch’s Salzburg knows exactly how he would fit in our system.
We have also nullified Harry Kane every time we played Tottenham under Pep, the guy’s been a complete non-entity, and that didn’t stop Pep for having him as a target for a period of the last window.
People sometimes go so deep under a certain fetishizing that they truly believe Pep only believes about the system and never the influence of individuality. He actually craves players who score an obscene amount of goals, and it’s a crime we are not providing him that right now. Of course, the 9 for him does have to fit a certain profile and quality, or they won’t start. I often read here nonsense like “false 9 allows the team to press more”, which is a ridiculous statement. The right 9 will lead the pressing. That’s why he got here and made Sergio change his game a bit. Lewandowski under him played every game when he was available except two. Which player in our team today can you say that about?
During that brief period when Ronaldo could have come here, I looked into what Pep had said about him over the years. He described the Portuguese as someone who scores “50 or 60 goals a season like Messi”. Sam Lee reported that he didn’t know how Ronaldo would fit in the City environment but he was convinced the team could use the amount of goals he would bring. This fits with what Balague reported a bit later, when he said Pep was convinced Ronaldo would score more than 40 goals per season for us:
Do you think this crossed his mind and was more important than “would Ronaldo press?” or any “but the system” hesitations? You can go through years of quotes by him to know how much he appreciates players like that who will score many goals. See how he talked about Lewa, Messi. Or this quote from last season, as explicit as it can be:
“We don’t have a single player who can win any game, we don’t have Cristiano, Messi, Neymar. We don’t have the kind of players who can win matches by themselves. I told the players many times, you have to play as a team. I’ll be honest. I would like to have a player who scores, in every game, four goals and to run like these guys. I would like that.”
Apart from my own personal reservations about Kane, one of the reasons why I was so against signing him last summer was because the kind of player he is (including his physicality) would actually reinforce some of the flaws we have as a team, instead of broaden our qualities. Of course Kane would have been bagged his goals (though not as many as some here envisioned— for instance, Ronaldo would have scored more), and I can see why Pep would have thought of him as a good alternative, but it would have almost too lazy for him. I actually hope Conte makes him play super well, makes him happy, helps them win a trophy like the Carabao or the Conference League, or both, and keep his price obscenely high.
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