Striker Erling Haaland led Manchester City to a thumping 6-3 victory over Manchester United in the derby on Sunday with three goals and two assists at the Etihad Stadium. While that was a 10/10 performance in a big game against arch-rivals, the focus point of his brilliant performance is the record he smashed.
His third treble in eight matches for the reigning Premier League champions makes him the fastest to reach the feat, and by quite a margin! The previous record, held by Liverpool striker Michael Owen, was 48 games.
This was also his third consecutive hat-trick in home matches, a record that will take some scoring to surpass.
Incidentally, he equalled his footballing idol Cristiano Ronaldo's record of three EPL hat-tricks, who helplessly watched the Norwegian put on a show from the opposition bench.
Derby demolition
Manchester City took all of eight minutes to take the lead in front of their home fans through Phil Foden, the game's other hat-trick hero. The champions cruised to a 4-0 lead at half-time before adding two more goals in the second period.
Manchester United did strike thrice, through Antony and Anthony Martial (two goals), but the result was already decided thanks to a dominating first-half performance from City.
Haaland caught the attention of the biggest clubs thanks to his incredible scoring record at German club Borussia Dortmund, where he scored 86 goals across 89 fixtures. This earned him a big-money move to a much harder league when Manchester City signed him in the summer of 2022. However, his appetite for goals got even bigger with the striker already appearing on the score sheet 14 times in the Premier League so far.
Goal machine
It is only the beginning of October, and he is well on course to beating the goals record for a season. Alan Shearer and Andy Cole share the current record with 34 goals a piece, which they scored for Newcastle United (1993-94) and Blackburn Rovers (1994-95), respectively. Haaland is averaging 1.75 goals a game so far, and should he keep this up, we could be looking at 66 goals across 38 matches.
This dominating performance from Haaland and City sees the reigning champions just one point behind league leaders Arsenal with 20 points in the bag.
With Haaland not looking like slowing down any time soon, can anyone stop him and City this season?
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