New Yorker - "Erling Haaland Plays Like a Viking"
By Zach Helfand
"Haaland’s style of play elicits not wonder but terror. He is enormous: six feet five, two hundred pounds, about the size and speed of the N.F.L. wide receiver Randy Moss. Watching him, I sometimes find myself giggling as I might over a big, obscene crash at a demolition derby. The play that did this to me most recently came in Norway’s first World Cup game, against Iraq. Haaland had already scored twice; Iraq’s Marko Farji was moving the ball across his box, with Haaland twenty yards away, until he suddenly broke into a sprint of bizarre ferocity—he has a quirk in his running form that causes his arms to thrash from side to side—heading straight at Farji, who, though still far from Haaland, seemed to abandon all soccer instinct and took off with the ball in the opposite direction, toward the sideline, while Haaland, for some reason, just kept chasing, and caught up to Farji right before they both went out of bounds, but in his overexuberance, before he could dislodge the ball, he knocked Farji to the ground and earned a foul, which caused him to let out a long scream, whether in frustration or as some battle-cry catharsis, I’m not sure. I’d never seen anything like it. I wanted to see more."
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