Erling Haaland and the penalty not taken

Erling Haaland has to take a penalty when he is on the pitch, let us cut to the chase here.

There were a few factors that contributed to Crystal Palace’s 1-0 victory over Manchester City in the FA Cup final, not least Palace’s own performance, but the largest was surely missing a penalty after your star striker handed the ball over to a team-mate, on a day when you created a hatful of chances but missed them all.

It was an unusual afternoon for City that begs many questions.

Why did Pep Guardiola pick that line-up?

Why did Dean Henderson not get sent off?

Why did a 19-year-old Argentinian make his debut — in the FA Cup final, no less — having never previously been in a squad?

Why were players who have made big contributions to the run to the final left out altogether?

But come on. Why did Haaland hand the ball over to Omar Marmoush?

“Haaland might’ve stepped up, I didn’t know which way he’d go, but Marmoush, I knew which way he was going,” Henderson said after the match. “I knew I would save it.”

Oh, look at where Marmoush often shoots? https://t.co/qpZpWGn0B1

— Alex (@AlexanderBrkr) May 17, 2025

It might be easy for him to say after the event, but that will, at the very least, add salt into the wounds as City reflect on a game when they created at least four other good chances beyond the penalty, while Palace struck with their first and only opportunity.

Guardiola insists he does not know why his players made that decision, and he refused to be drawn on his feelings over it, save for an observation about how long Marmoush kept hold of the ball on the spot after Haaland kissed it and handed it over — although there was also a curiously long pause before the whistle was blown to allow him to take it.

“That moment, for free kicks and penalties, it’s the feeling,” Guardiola said. “They saw that Omar was ready to take it. I think that Omar took a lot of time, with the ball, he stopped, you should be out (of the box), to not put more pressure on yourself, and Henderson made a good save.”

That said, two years ago, Guardiola was clearly furious when Haaland handed the ball over to Ilkay Gundogan so the German could seal a hat-trick having scored two against Leeds. Gundogan missed, the game got nervy, and the manager shouted at Haaland, “You have to take it.”

“A taker is a taker,” he later said. “At 2-0, this is a business, not a situation where we cannot forget it.”

At least then there was the sentimentality of trying to give Gundogan a hat-trick in one of his final games before leaving the club that summer, but — at the risk of overlooking something that makes a lot of sense — what similar reason could there be for handing over a ball to a player who had only taken nine penalties before in his professional career (scored eight, missed one).

This is a team that has been lacking a goal threat for much of the season. Ironically, only in Haaland’s injury-enforced absence for the past six weeks have others stepped up to share the burden, but before that, he was far and away their biggest source of goals.

Since he returned last week at Southampton, City have not scored once. That may sound like he is to blame, and maybe there was an element of him being half-fit and impacting City’s fluidity at St Mary’s last Saturday, but it is not that they lacked creativity at Wembley.

City were, although not everybody agrees, good. They created loads of chances. Kevin De Bruyne fired one over the bar in the first half and in the second half, there were two from identical positions when Bernardo Silva and Nico O’Reilly found themselves in a rare acre of space in the box, and another when Claudio Echeverri, the 19-year-old debutant, did the same on the other side.

(Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

But even those good chances — especially in the context of creating space against a very well-disciplined deep defence — were not as good as a free hit at goal from 12 yards, when the guy who should be taking it has scored 85 per cent of his 57 penalties.

OK, he does not give off quite the level of confidence that truly elite takers like Yaya Toure or Frank Lampard used to, but you do not get too much better than Haaland considering how many he has taken.

Remember that Palace were 2-0 up against City last month but fell apart as soon as De Bruyne pulled one back and lost 5-2 — had City levelled here, nine minutes before half-time, there is a strong argument they would have been fine.

With Guardiola keeping quiet and, as yet, no word from either Haaland or Marmoush, we may have to wait a while to get a glimpse into a decision which, no matter which way you spin it, can surely never make sense. Were Haaland, say, injured or otherwise struggling at that point, then the problem would be equally egregious — why was he on the pitch?

“Maybe the thought of taking a penalty at Wembley might have been too much for him,” Wayne Rooney pondered afterwards. “You never know, he’s a human being.”

(Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

While we wait for answers, there are plenty of other talking points from Wembley. The biggest issue many will have will be Guardiola’s selection.

Having built City’s recent revival on the stability granted by putting six players close together in the middle of the pitch, squeezed in by high and wide full-backs, he shook that up completely, not only in shape, but by removing all but one of the players who give him the much-craved control.

It evoked the nightmare of the 2021 Champions League final when he did not pick either Rodri or Fernandinho in holding midfield (and started the out-of-favour Raheem Sterling).

Playing Bernardo Silva as the sole holding midfielder here — as it looked an hour before kick-off — behind the five most attacking players in the squad, against a Palace side that can be deadly on the break, screamed disaster.

But it was not, to be fair. Look, Palace won the match, so in some eyes the line-up cannot be justified, but City had all the control of recent weeks, conceded one chance and created a lot more than they have in a lot of the matches they have won recently — think Everton away, Aston Villa, Wolves.

“Talking about too many football-specific issues today, I think it is 90 per cent how well City played and 90 per cent how well we defended with passion,” Palace boss Oliver Glasner said, acknowledging City’s performance with some unorthodox maths.

To be honest, Guardiola’s selection did not really require words to justify because there was enough evidence on the pitch, but he did shed some light on it.

“I expected a similar match to Southampton, so I put more players in the box, with proper wingers for one against ones,” he said. “Savinho in the first 10 minutes of the second half was brilliant and Doku was brilliant all the game as always, and Omar and Erling in the box for second balls and then some clever actions from Nico or Kevin arriving behind.”

When asked later if he felt having to play Bernardo deep in Mateo Kovacic’s absence hurt the team, he offered more.

“Kova would have played, but he was injured, he doesn’t feel good,” he said. “I think we didn’t suffer, right? Defensively.”

The justification for leaving Rico Lewis and James McAtee out of the squad in favour of 19-year-old Vitor Reis, who started against Leyton Orient and Plymouth in this competition and came off the bench for a few minutes of a league game against Leicester City, and Echeverri, who made a squad for the very first time, did not seem quite so joined up.

“I want to be honest, it was not a bad decision,” he said of Echeverri, who signed from River Plate in January and has been slated for a loan next season.

“The way he played, the chances that he had. He had three chances in small spaces.

“Maybe because it’s the FA Cup it’s special and it should go to the other ones, but he is moving well in the small, small spaces, he is so creative in that, and I thought in the last minutes that to find something in these type of games, when they defend with 11 in the box, it is a question of, ‘I take the ball, I dribble, make a one-two, shoot and score a goal’.

“The other option is to cross, but I think Crystal Palace love it. And he had that. He had the first shot, normally he is so clever there, so precise, and after he had one or two more, like Nico had, Kevin in the first half, the penalty. We had the chances, we had the chances, but we could not score.”

It is a strong case for Echeverri’s inclusion, as left-field as it seems, although you might argue that somebody else may have finished those chances better than Echeverri. Either way, what Reis and Echeverri will gain will surely pale in comparison to how Lewis and McAtee feel at being left out altogether.

Those scars may run a little deeper, but had Haaland felt like taking that penalty, all the other issues would probably have gone away.

(Top photo: Catherine Ivill – AMA/Getty Images)

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