Manchester City’s Erling Haaland strikes twice on league debut in win at West Ham

It is going to become a familiar sight this season: Kevin De Bruyne picking the ball up in the middle of the pitch, lifting his head and playing a defence-shredding pass through for Erling Haaland to race away from his markers and slot a clinical finish past a despairing goalkeeper.

Who said that Pep Guardiola doesn’t know what to do with a striker? For Manchester City, the early evidence is that their new No 9 is not going to disrupt Guardiola’s passing machine. The champions outclassed a limp West Ham side from start to finish and eased their way to a sleepy 2-0 victory thanks to two from Haaland, who followed up a first-half penalty with the kind of goal that suggests he is already on the same wavelength as his new teammates.

For City, the focus over the summer was finding ways to stay motivated. In a sense Guardiola has followed Sir Alex Ferguson’s formula of renovating from a position of strength, selling Raheem Sterling, Gabriel Jesus and Oleksandr Zinchenko, but the principles remain intact. It is about evolution rather than revolution and it was immediately clear that this was more or less the same City, albeit with one crucial difference: an attack led not by a twinkle-toed false nine, but a big, muscular target man whose primary function is smashing the ball in the back of the net.

The eyes were instantly drawn to Haaland. It even seemed that there were questions for the 22-year-old to answer after some nervy finishing during City’s defeat to Liverpool in the Community Shield. For instance, would the physicality of English football be too much for a player accustomed to the less robust defenders of the Bundesliga? And just what did Guardiola have in store for the former Borussia Dortmund striker? A stint at