Tactically Naive: A football player speared a fan in the testicles with a corner flag

Hello, and welcome to another installment of Tactically Naive, SB Nation’s weekly soccer column. This week: pistachio nuts. Aren’t they great?

From the outside, It can often seem like there’s a lot of suffering built into being a Newcastle United fan. This is a club owned by man who evidently holds the club, the city, the fans, and maybe even the whole idea of “other people” in barely concealed contempt. And to be fair, the feeling’s mutual.

Managers arrive starry-eyed at the prospect of guiding this should-be-great club, then leave a little while later, haunted by the things they’ve seen. Players arrive for large fees bearing huge promise, and break, or melt, or simply fade away. The search for a striker goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on. Obviously Newcastle aren’t the Premier League’s most cursed club: that’s Everton. But they do seem to spend a lot of time unhappy.

But every now and then, a shaft of light. A last minute winner against Chelsea, perhaps. And suddenly it all seems worth it, as you are drowned in this glorious surge of communal emotion; as the majesty and wonder of this stupid brilliant hilarious sport takes you and shakes you and throws you in the air. Nothing, nothing, could ruin this instant of perfection. Except perhaps one of your own players hammering a corner flag into the crowd, and into your testicles.

If this were a metaphor, it would probably get deleted for being a bit on the nose. Well, not the nose. But reality’s editors are notoriously unreliable and usually drunk, so it slipped through. Newcastle United: chucking spears at your balls since 1892. This thing was moving at a fair clip, too.

Still, at least in moments like this, you can always rely on the sympathy of your fellow fans.

Tactically Naive doesn’t believe in destiny. But it looks like Erling Braut Håland does; or at the very least, destiny believes in him. This weekend he made his debut for Borussia Dortmund, coming on after 56 minutes with his new side 3-1 down. Three minutes later, he scored his first. 20 minutes after that, he scored his third.

Nothing like a debut hat trick to say: “Hello. I’m here. And I’m going to score lots and lots of lovely goals.”

A little credit must go to Augsburg’s defence, of course, who have heard of the concept of “an offside trap” but have decided that it’s not for them, thanks. And one was a tap-in. But! Two of Håland’s goals, the first and third, were proper striker’s goals, tucked away with the precision and assurance of a veteran.

The first a snapped finish across the keeper and just inside the far post; the third a kind of mirrorworld version of that goal Thierry Henry always scored, where he keeps the ball rolling along next to him before opening his body and curving it home, all at speed. Henry used his right foot to score his; Håland his left. He’s going to be so good.

It’s useful that he’s going to be at Dortmund for at least, ooh, half a season, because Dortmund are fun and make the Bundesliga a more interesting place. But also, Håland appears to be the natural heir to Mario Götze. Not as a player, but as Europe’s foremost “footballer that looks like an old-school European princeling, back when such people were appointed by God to ride around on horses ordering the execution of peasants.”

Not the most prestigious award in football, no. But Tactically Naive feels it’s important to keep track of these things just the same. We should probably get a certificate made up.

It’s the face. He doesn’t have the Habsburg Jaw, or anything like it, but there’s a certain set about the eyes, a quirk in the smile. An air surety that just shades into smug. The calm, imperious certainty of a man who knows that he only has to crook his finger — or swing his foot — and the world will do as it’s told. Because that’s what the world is for.

Which, to be fair, it has so far. Three goals on your big club debut: the footballing equivalent of pulling a sword from a stone, or being born to an Exquisitely Important Family.

As Super Sundays go, Manchester United’s visit to Liverpool was only moderately super. Indeed, after Burnley’s surprise win over Leicester early in the day, it was positively mundane. Liverpool won, as everybody except the most paranoid of Liverpool fans and most inebriated of United fans expected them to, and the title moved from “certain thing” to “like, really certain thing”.

United didn’t get hammered, which is a thin silver lining but one we’re sure Ole Gunnar Solskjaer is clinging to. If you can cling to silver linings. They’re just effects of light around the edge of clouds, right? His hands would just pass right through.

Indeed, they might even have nicked a draw: Anthony Martial slashed a very presentable late opportunity into the stands. But it would have been an act of burglary; there was exactly one team on the field deserving of the Big Club label they both luxuriate in. If United had scored? Liverpool would have scored another.

The gap to defending champions Manchester City is now 16 points; the gap to United a mind-boggling 30. One odd statistical quirk of the season is that City have scored 12 more goals than the team they’re chasing. Overall, City have done more damage to their opposition. It’s just that City’s opponents have been able to punch back, whereas Liverpool’s opposition have found it almost impossible to land a blow.

Sometimes Klopp’s side are devastating, and sometimes they’re scrappy. But no team has ever hovered up points quite so relentlessly.