Espen Undheim smiles as he recalls the early training sessions where he first met Erling Haaland. The superstar striker wasn’t anywhere near the physical specimen he is today, but his former coach remembers seeing flashes of potential in the “skinny” kid, who had such a burning passion for the sport.
The pair first met at Bryne FK, a soccer club in the southern tip of Norway. Undheim was and still is a youth coach for the team and Haaland, then around 8, was one of the thousands of local kids eager to learn the game.
“What was special with him was that he was always looking to score, even if he wasn’t in a position where he could, he moved and tried to be in situations where he could score goals,” Undheim tells CNN Sports.
⚽️ sign up for THE beautiful game by cnn sports ⚽️
- CNN Sports will give you behind-the-scenes reporting from the World Cup, expert analysis and point you towards the biggest storylines of the day. Click here to sign up for the newsletter (it’s free!).
“And when he scored goals, he celebrated them a lot, running all over the pitch. Even as a kid, I could see that he had an intuition for scoring.”
It might not have seemed probable at the time, but that knack for goalscoring would later fire Haaland to the very top of soccer, where he’s now one of the best players on the planet.
His record simply speaks for itself. In his four seasons at Manchester City, Haaland has been the Premier League’s top scorer on three occasions. It also took him just 111 league matches to score 100 goals in the division, the fastest player ever to reach the milestone.
The 25-year-old has also fired Norway to this summer’s World Cup – the first time his nation has qualified for the tournament since 1998 – and has already shone on the biggest stage of all.
.jpg)
.jpg)
0 ความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น