🚨 Alan Shearer on Erling Haaland reaching 100 non-penalty Premier League goals: “Watching the game and somebody mentioned that Haaland had reached 100 Premier League goals without penalties. I asked how many appearances it had taken him. They said 139. I said, ‘Sorry, how many?’ Because I know how difficult it is to score goals in this league. I spent years doing it. You have afternoons when the ball won’t come to you, defenders who spend the entire match pulling your shirt, goalkeepers who suddenly decide to have the best game of their careers. And then there’s this lad. Ipswich equalised shortly after City took the lead. It was 1-1, the game was becoming uncomfortable, and you could see they weren’t going to make it easy for City. Then Haaland scores. That’s what I like about him. He doesn’t need the whole match to be about him. He can spend 10 minutes hardly getting a touch, and the next time the ball comes into the area, he’s the one celebrating. People sometimes say he doesn’t do enough outside the box. Well, I don’t remember many centre-forwards being paid to collect the ball from their own goalkeeper. Of course you want your striker involved. But when you’ve got someone who understands where the goal is like Haaland does, your first responsibility is to get the ball to him. Look at his second goal. Ndiaye plays the pass, there’s a defender trying to deal with him, and Haaland makes it look like the simplest thing in the world. But it isn’t simple. He’s got to judge the movement, protect his position, get his body right and finish. That’s proper centre-forward play. And what makes me laugh is that he scores twice and people are still discussing the chances he didn’t take. He had another one ruled out for offside, and I’m watching him thinking, ‘He’ll probably go home annoyed that he hasn’t got three.’ That’s the mentality you want. I remember people judging strikers by whether they could do everything. Could they drop deep? Could they dribble? Could they play the final pass? Those things are useful. But I’ll tell you what defenders hate more than anything: a striker who only needs one moment to ruin their afternoon. Haaland has made scoring two goals in a Premier League match look like a fairly normal Saturday. And that’s probably the biggest compliment I can give him. Because I can assure you, it isn’t normal.”