Embracing the Value in Scarcity

The night before I met Erling Haaland had been the night of that television interview. You may remember it, from back in the before times. On his first appearance in the Champions League for Borussia Dortmund, Haaland had scored twice against Paris St.-Germain. The second had contained enough power to rattle the bones of Signal Iduna Park.

As he walked off the field, he was steered toward the waiting banks of television cameras. Everyone, at that time, wanted a piece of Europe’s shooting star. His first appointment was with German television. The reporter was polite and assiduous, asking questions in English, simultaneously translating the answers into German for his audience.

It became clear that Haaland, pretty quickly, did not want to play ball. He gave brief, matter-of-fact responses: not rude, not exactly, but seemingly designed to highlight that he did not think much of the questions. The reporter, gamely, persisted. At one point, Haaland rolled his eyes and nodded his head, the universal gesture for “what’s with this guy?”

The prospect of my sitting and asking him about his relationship with his father, the former Leeds United and Norway midfielder Alfie, suddenly seemed a little more daunting. If Haaland was not in the mood to talk, if he decided not to play ball, then it might be a very long 30 minutes indeed. For both of us.

There is a risk in judging a player from what you see in a postgame television interview. There is a limit to what a reporter can ask — there is no time for an in-depth investigation into anyone’s psyche — and a limit to what a player can say. They are still caked in sweat. They are often still catching their breath. And much of what they have just done, out on the field, is not immediately explicable to them; it is, instead, a mixture of instinct and instruction internalized so deeply that the two are indistinguishable.

Haaland was a reminder of that. He does, I think, have a prickly side: closed questions tend to elicit a closed response. He will not do your work for you. But once he settled down, and stretched those long legs out on the table in front of him, and talked about his father, and what it’s like to be the Son Of Someone, the sentences grew longer, more considered. He is surprisingly offbeat. He is a little quirky. A flash interview after a game is no time to show that. But that does not mean it is not there.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/sports/soccer/soccer-baseball.html