Erling Haaland
CHRIS Mepham felt Cherries kept superstar striker Erling Haaland “fairly quiet”, but admitted Manchester City were “in cruise control” on Saturday. All eyes were on the Norwegian frontman, as he made his home debut for City, following his £51million switch from Borussia Dortmund. Asked if keeping out the 22-year-old, who netted twice on the opening day against West Ham United, can be viewed as a minor victory for him as a centre-back,
Chris Mepham said: “Yeah, I think so. He’s kind of like an all-round striker. Very physical, quick, direct. So he’s got a lot of attributes and I think ultimately we kind of kept him fairly quiet. But, of course, you keep someone like him quiet and then you’ve got the likes of (Kevin) De Bruyne, (Phil) Foden, (Bernardo) Silva coming on, (Jack) Grealish, that can create those moments of quality and you saw that with De Bruyne (on Saturday). He’s got real quality in those sort of areas and he can hurt you. We would’ve liked to keep most of their players quiet, but it’s obviously a big ask.”
Reflecting on the game as a whole, which saw Cherries fall behind on 17 minutes, before going 3-0 down by half-time,
Chris Mepham added: “I think in an ideal world, you’d hold on to a draw for a bit longer. The longer it stays 0-0, I feel like they need to come out. But as soon as they got the first goal, I think they were pretty much in cruise control. They scored a couple of goals after that, which is obviously very disappointing. You know going into the game they’ve got players of huge quality, all throughout their team. So you know they’re going to create chances. Unfortunately a few of those chances turned into goals. I think they showed their quality and then obviously 3-0 down at half-time, it’s obviously a big ask to get anything from the game.”
Discussing the side’s performance in the second half, keeping the game competitive with goalkeeper Mark Travers only beaten again by a late Jefferson Lerma own goal,
Chris Mepham said: “At half-time 3-0 down, you can either crumble and go into your shell, or you can embrace it and try to enjoy the challenge of playing against these world-class players. I think in the second half we very much did that. We tried to limit them to few chances and I thought we dug in deep. It’s not an easy one, but I thought we gave a good account of ourselves.”
Cherries will look to get back on track when they welcome Arsenal to Vitality Stadium on Saturday (5.30pm).
