On the face of it, Erling Haaland had a fairly quiet game in Manchester City's draw at Real Madrid on Tuesday.
However, according to Real goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois, Haaland's presence alone forced the Champions League holders to abandon their usual tactics and defend deeper in order to stop the striker from getting the service he is used to. As a result, Courtois noted that more space opened up for City to have shots from range, with Kevin De Bruyne and Rodri both going close before De Bruyne took aim in the second half and drew the Blues level.
Speaking to BT Sport, Courtois said: "We defended a bit more but if you want to defend against Haaland, you don't give him the space to run in the deep to find those passes that Kevin, Gundo, Bernardo [Silva] can find so we tried to avoid that.
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"As a consequence they shot more from distance. The goal comes from this, it pushed us deeper. They have guys like Rodri, Kevin, Gundogan who can shoot the ball well.
"City are a team who play with possession. This year with Haaland they play more direct. Sometimes in the Premier League Ederson kicks really deep. Today he almost didn't do it. It was a different kind of game. When they had the ball we dropped down to not give them space.
"As much as they have this quality to play the ball around, when we recovered the ball sometimes we were too eager to get the ball fast from deep. We didn't control our game because we're also used to having the possession. They pressed well and you don't want to take too many risks at the back."
However, with City having home advantage in the second leg and the scores level, Courtois leaned on Real's experience of winning the Champions League, saying: "There is everything to play for next week. It will be like a final, I hope we can put that in our minds even if we're away. We're quite good at winning finals. Hopefully we can mentalise it like that."
Courtois' rallying cry was echoed by Luka Modric, who explained how Carlos Ancelotti changed Real's approach in the second half to get more of the ball from City.
"At half-time, we had things to correct. The manager wanted us on the ball more and for us to be more creative," he said. "That's why we freed Camavinga to push into midfield more often – it went well. We merited a better result than this. But we'll enter the second leg with the same confidence and optimism that we can win over there."
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