Manchester City 5 Wolves 1: Erling Haaland reinvigorated as the champions win with minimal fuss

Manchester City — and Erling Haaland — offered a swift response to Arsenal’s 3-0 lunchtime rout of Bournemouth, with their own 5-1 win against Wolves five hours later.

The north Londoners had moved four points clear at the top of the Premier League with their victory, but champions City showed no signs of nerves as they immediately cut the deficit back down to one point, with a game in hand.

It all means City will win a fourth successive title if they win their remaining three matches.

The Athletic’s Sam Lee assesses the evening’s key talking points…

Erling Haaland looks reinvigorated

He’s always a talking point, Haaland. There is always a big focus whenever he is playing badly and/or struggling for service. Last year, he had apparently joined the wrong club when he moved from Borussia Dortmund. This season, his link-up play is apparently that of a League Two player.

There were some very worthwhile points made alongside those statements, but the more outlandish elements are the ones which colour the discourse. And there has been more of that this season because there have been fewer afternoons like this one: on Saturday evening, Haaland shut down any idea of a Wolves comeback after they cut the lead to 3-1 early in the second half with an emphatic thump into the far corner, scoring his fourth goal of the match.

He missed almost two full months of the season in December and January through injury and did not look himself when he returned but a recent, shorter spell out of the side seems to have reinvigorated him. He was sharper against Nottingham Forest last weekend and today was like that run in his first few months at City, when he barely seemed to do much but ended up with a hat-trick before half-time.

Haaland did, in fact, have more touches of the ball against Wolves (33) than in any other league game this season, something which is always on the agenda if he doesn’t do well, and he looked far more up for the fight with his centre-back, in this case Maximilian Kilman, than he did in games earlier in the spring. And so an up-and-down personal season sees him move to 25 Premier League goals, five more than anybody else.

If he keeps this up, he will be celebrating more than a second Golden Boot in a row.

City are masters of taking the sting out of a game

An impressive element of this victory was that City made it feel like a game in October or November — the type of 3pm kick-off where everybody expects them to win and they do so without much trouble. That was the case again, just with the significant added context of them knowing that if they were to drop points here, they would probably not win the title.

This could have been a tricky match, and there would have been extra national attention given the interest in the championship race, and the fact that Arsenal had won earlier in the day, which is supposed to pile on the pressure for your rivals at this time of year.

But you would not have picked up on any of that had you watched the 90 minutes in isolation.

City did have a ropey patch after going 1-0 up, constantly giving the ball away and Wolves doing well to keep it, but in truth not much else. They even lost the ball sloppily right at the start of the move that led to their second goal! Even so, it was 3-0 at half-time. And even when Wolves pulled one back eight minutes into the second half, City killed off the comeback within a minute, with Haaland blasting in his fourth, showing there is more than just penalties and close-range finishes in the locker.

They barely had to get out of second gear, in truth, and with now just three games standing between City and an unprecedented fourth league title in a row, you cannot really say fairer than that.

Haaland heads in his and City’s second of the game (Simon Stacpoole/Offside via Getty Images)

Does Rodri get enough credit…?

There are plenty of legitimate reasons why Phil Foden was named the Football Writers’ Association footballer of the year on Friday, and why he might well win the equivalent Professional Footballers’ Association award as well, but Rodri has to be right there with him in the running when it comes to being the best player of the season. The Spanish midfielder is City’s most important player, that is for sure, and the two games against Wolves this season help sum that up.

In September he was suspended when City lost 2-1 at Molineux, with Wolves head coach Gary O’Neil admitting that for all the preparation he did with his side beforehand, Rodri’s absence was a massive help.

Today, he was firmly in the middle of the action. When City lost the ball just before their second goal, it was he who won it back. He found Kevin De Bruyne, strode on, got the ball back and delivered it for Haaland to head home.

Players like Rodri always have to work harder to win awards like this, when fine players like Foden are banging the ball into the top corner, or running through the middle of teams. But Rodri actually does that too, and there are solid numbers to go with it.

He has seven league goals this season, making him City’s fourth-highest scorer, and is joint top among their players for league assists, with nine. Only Haaland, Foden and Julian Alvarez have more direct contributions to Premier League goals for City in 2023-24, and this is on top of all the less obvious stuff that adds up to him being the fulcrum of a team who might make it four titles in a row and also retain the FA Cup, a year after winning the treble.

What did Pep Guardiola say?

We will bring you this after he has spoken at the post-match press conference.

What next for City?

Saturday, May 11: Fulham (A), Premier League, 12.30pm BST, 7.30am ET

City head to west London having won the reverse fixture 5-1 back in September, with Haaland scoring a hat-trick.

Despite the added pressure of a title race that looks like going to the wire, the numbers are heavily weighted in the away side’s favour — and that may be underselling it. Guardiola has won all 10 games he has managed against Fulham, while City’s last Premier League loss at Craven Cottage was back in November 2005. That afternoon, a double from Steed Malbranque led the home side to a 2-1 win over a Stuart Pearce-managed City, whose goal came from winger Lee Croft — the only Premier League goal of his career.