Remembering when Erling Haaland scored three hat-tricks in *one* game

He is now a global superstar and is tearing up the Premier League at Manchester City. But do you remember when Erling Haaland exploded onto the scene, scoring nine goals in the space of ninety minutes and leaving Honduran children helpless in his wake?

On May 30, 2019, there was talk of Alf-Inge Haaland's son - born in Leeds in the first year of the new millennium - impressing as a teenager under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in Molde.

At the time, Leeds United were even said to have made an offer, but they were beaten to his signature by perennial Austrian champions Red Bull Salzburg in the summer of 2018, whom he eventually joined six months later.< /p >

It was at Salzburg that Haaland became stratospheric, scoring 29 goals in 27 appearances, including eight in the Champions League group stage. But the first time he really captured the attention of the wider footballing world was on the international stage.

Scoring nine goals for Norway's youth side in a 12-0 win over Honduras at the Under-20 World Cup in Poland is definitely a way to make a name for yourself.

"Pure pain," football agent Jose Luis Rodriguez recently told Norwegian outlet VG, admitting that none of the Honduran players are ready to relive the experience, such was the humiliation of defeat.

"For the players, it was horrible, they cried a long time afterwards. They were angry. Back home, in Honduras, the whole country was talking about them. It was an absolutely crazy pressure. Many of them they say it's the worst thing they've ever experienced in life."

Rodriguez caught up with teenager Haaland after the game and couldn't resist asking for a selfie with a player who had gone from an unknown relative to the next big thing overnight.

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READ: Compare Haaland and Mbappe's records to Messi and Ronaldo's at 21

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"I said, 'You ruined my boys'. Haaland replied: 'I was annoyed because I could score 11 goals. "It's a fucking machine. I just thought, 'Holy shit.'"

Given what happened in the years that followed: becoming the fastest player to reach 20 Champions League goals, in just 14 games; scoring a total of 85 goals in 88 games for Borussia Dortmund - it should come as no surprise that it was men against boys when he single-handedly put Honduras' Under-20s to the slaughter.

By any measure, he's one of the best players in the world, and already one of the deadliest goalscorers in the history of the game.

It wasn't a million miles away from Cristiano Ronaldo or Zlatan Ibrahimovic showing up at your little brother's sports day, with no mercy.

Here's how the game unfolded, in gruesome and glorious detail.

Showing the kind of instinct around the penalty area that has become a Bundesliga defender's nightmare, Haaland's opener was a fairly straightforward finish by his standards at the end of a quick, incisive move.

In what is simply unfair to Honduras, Norway have also bragged about compatriot Jens Petter Hauge - provider of the assist for the opening goal - who is now at Eintracht Frankfurt on loan from Germany. 'AC Milan and a senior international.

It only took them seven minutes to combine and slice the Honduran backline. Threatening.

A nice ball of deep cuts through the 10 outfielders for Honduras, finding Haaland in space and doing well to keep wide....