The World Cup made Erling Haaland VERY angry, Marcus Rashford is back and Arsenal are soaring – The Warm-Up

On the first day of Barclays, we welcomed back the league,
With Arsenal top of the tree.

On the second day of Barclays, as we welcomed back the league,
Rashford looking naughty,
As United win along with Chelsea.

On the third day of Barclays, as we welcomed back the league,
Three points for City,
Two goals for Haaland,
And Walker’s unusual selfie.

With all the fuss around Kylian Mbappe, arguably the greatest player on the planet right now, and Lionel Messi, unarguably the greatest player in history, it’s easy to forget that one man’s trajectory could soon make them both footnotes.

No player has scored more than 34 goals in a single season in Premier League history. Nowadays, in the ‘slimlined’ 38-game format, the record stands at 31 goals. For a few more weeks at least. Erling Haaland already has 20 **AND** we’re still in December **AND** there was a World Cup plonked in the middle of the season. He needs just 15 across Manchester City’s remaining 23 games to set a new best – and given he’s currently scoring once every 57 minutes, we suspect we’ll be celebrating this sometime in early February.

Haaland could have taken a bigger chunk out of Alan Shearer and Andy Cole’s record had he not had a few cobwebs due to Norway being hopeless at international football. He admitted he was “triggered” and “irritated” while watching the World Cup from the sofa, eventually taking out his frustrations on Leeds, the most unlikely city of his birth.

It can’t have been easy heading into the World Cup break as the best player in the world, only to see everyone forget about him the moment Messi scored a penalty and Mbappe kicked the ball past a Championship defender (just kidding, Harry Souttar, no one got past you).

But if we needed any reminder – and we really shouldn’t have – about Haaland’s superstar powers, then his double at Elland Road was it. At his current rate, he will smash through the 50-goal barrier and just keep going. If he carries on this way, we’re going to have to downgrade every 10/10 rating ever given out to a striker to a 9. It can’t have been a perfect performance, it wasn’t Haaland.

If you a draw a graph with “performance” on one axis and “time spent saving children from the government” on the other, and then plotted Marcus Rashford’s last four years on that same graph… well, it would suggest that you can only have one or the other.

After heroically ensuring the kids were fed during the pandemic, Rashford is fully focused on football again and boy is it paying dividends. The comparisons to Mbappe always felt a bit flimsy, but his finish for the opener against Nottingham Forest, and sensational cut-back assist for Anthony Martial's second, suggest they might not be so far from the truth.

We just hope that if Rashford MP is called upon again by a struggling nation, he can find a way to maintain his superb form on the pitch and continue to use his spotlight for good.

The worst Christmas No. 1 since… actually, Arsenal are significantly better than the LadBaby monstrosity currently topping the charts. But “top at Christmas” still felt a fragile omen to cling to heading into Boxing Day given we had played barely a third of the season, they had lost their main man in attack and Haaland had enjoyed six weeks being plugged into the national grid.

Indeed, when Said Benrahma stroked West Ham ahead from the penalty spot in north London, the great unravelling looked on before we even entered 2023. But then Arsenal did a very un-Arsenal thing. They responded despite adversity.

They were given assistance, of course. The weirdest defensive line allowed everyone’s favourite player, Bukayo Saka, to be two yards onside – and not two off – for the equaliser, before Lukasz Fabianski decided he might get a winners’ medal at Arsenal after all if he just let Gabriel Martinelli’s shot squeeze past him at the near post.

But if you need luck in a title charge, you also need a whole lot of talent – and it came from the most unlikely source. Eddie Nketiah has spent the last four weeks being told he is not good enough to replace Gabriel Jesus by absolutely everyone with an opinion on football, approximately one billion people. So it was fitting that it was he who evoked memories of a certain Dennis Bergkamp with a sublime spin turn and low finish to seal a 3-1 victory at the Emirates.

Nketiah is going to have to do that A LOT if he’s going to help Arsenal pull off the impossible – once every 57 minutes would do nicely – but wow, this was quite the start.

For adding another layer of chaos to the Premier League. Any other £85 million striker would see a ball dropping out the sky, and no one around them except a retreating goalkeeper, as an opportunity to take a touch, compose themselves, and finish. But not Darwin Nunez. Presented with that very scenario during Liverpool’s 3-1 win over Aston Villa, his brain piped up “just smash it, lad”.

He missed, obviously, but Nunez’s one-man mission to fashion, and then miss, as many chances as possible was Boxing Day drama at its most compelling. More please.

The Premier League’s bottom seven fall into one of three categories:

Six of the seven lost their first matches since the World Cup break – congratulations to Wolves for getting off the basement floor – and all of them look like they could go down based on our sample size of one game of association football.

It’s not easy being at the bottom, especially when you’re now competing against teams effectively bankrolled by countries, but we do wonder if this is the season to solve fixture congestion by sneakily relegating an extra couple of sides this year…

Apparently football exists outside the Premier League? We’re not convinced either, but some lad called Neymar decided to get himself sent off for a truly outstanding dive. We don’t know what’s worse – that, or waiting for the glory penalty in a World Cup shootout and never getting to take one.

At least Mbappe stepped up in the 96th minute to snatch a 2-1 win for PSG over Strasbourg.

The Premier League enjoys a one-day hibernation, while we will have live text commentary from La Liga as Atletico Madrid face Elche (20:30 GMT).