On Saturday, Erling Haaland will try to attain something against Brentford that nobody has managed since 1946.

The Manchester City striker has scored a hat-trick in each of his last two Premier League games and if he can rating one other against Thomas Frank's side on the Etihad Stadium this weekend, he’ll join a really exclusive list of players.

It has only happened 4 times that a player has scored three goals in three consecutive games within the English top division – and three of those were before 1930.

Here are the stories of those 4 opportunities and the boys the 24-year-old Norwegian international aspires to emulate.

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Opponents: Liverpool, Leicester City, West Ham United

Osborne, Tottenham's centre-forward, played 26 times in all competitions for the club throughout the 1924–25 season… and did not rating a single goal.

That summer, the offside rule was modified – the variety of opposing players who needed to be in front of an attacker to avoid being offside was reduced from three to 2. Unsurprisingly, this led to more goals in games and more possibilities for Osborne and his fellow strikers (the goals per game ratio within the English top flight in 1925/26 was 3.69, in comparison with 2.58 the season before).

The England international (three appearances and 0 goals at that time) scored twice away against Sheffield United in his first game of the 1925/26 season, and three more goals got here in his next ten games, before Liverpool's visit to White Hart Lane on 24 October, where the 29-year-old scored a hat-trick as Tottenham won 3-1.

Per week later, Osborne – who was born near Cape Town in what’s now South Africa – scored one other three goals in the following game, away to Leicester. Tottenham lost that game 5-3, making it the one case on this list where a player scored his hat-trick in a losing effort.

The following Saturday, November 7, Osborne became the primary player in English top-flight history to attain a hat-trick in three consecutive matches as Tottenham beat West Ham 4-2 at home.

Osborne is the one certainly one of these 4 players to not have scored 4 goals in at the very least certainly one of the games in query, and can be the just one to not have scored a hat-trick within the treble of trebles against Arsenal.

He did not rating in Tottenham's next league match against Newcastle United, and he only managed yet one more top-flight hat-trick in his profession: against Newcastle in January 1928 (4 goals).

However, Osborne's form within the 1925/26 season – he finished the season with 25 goals in 39 league games – earned him a return to the national team, and in May he scored a hat-trick against Belgium, the primary time because the First World War that an English player had scored three goals in a match.

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Tom Jennings, for Leeds United in 1926

Opponents: Arsenal, Liverpool, Blackburn Rovers

The Scotsman Jennings scored three hat-tricks in a row and took Leeds from sixteenth to seventh place within the early autumn of the 1926/27 season.

The striker joined the Yorkshire club from Scottish club Raith Rovers in 1925 and played every league game in his first full season (1925–26), scoring 26 goals.

The then 24-year-old began the 1926/27 season with three goals in seven league games, scoring three against visiting Arsenal on 25 September as Leeds won 4-1. Under the management of manager Arthur Fairclough, they travelled to Anfield on 2 October and Jennings scored 4 goals past Liverpool goalkeeper Arthur Riley, two goals in each half, to assist his side to a 4-2 victory.

Per week later, Jennings scored one other 4 goals as Leeds beat Blackburn Rovers 4-1 at Elland Road.

In Leeds' next league game, away to Leicester, Jennings scored twice but did not rating a fourth consecutive hat-trick as they lost 3-2. Never before has a player come so near 4 consecutive hat-tricks within the English top flight.

Jennings finished that season with 37 goals in all competitions (35 of them within the league). That total has only been surpassed twice in Leeds' history – each times by John Charles (43 in 1953-54 and 39 in 1956-57), although Leeds were playing within the Second Division in the primary of those seasons.

However, the club's good run quickly ended after Jennings' three hat-tricks: Fairclough's team won only six of their last 32 league games and were relegated.

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Dixie Dean, for Everton in 1928

Opponents: Burnley, Arsenal, Bolton Wanderers

Dean is arguably the very best goalscorer in English football history. In the 1927/28 season he scored 60 goals within the First Division for Everton. No other player – neither before nor since – has scored even 50 goals in a season within the English top flight.

Dean, who turned just 21 in January this season, played in 39 league games for Everton, scoring in 29 of them. He scored seven hat-tricks and his goals helped the club win the title for the primary time in 13 years.

He reached the 60-goal mark by scoring seven times in the ultimate two games of the season – 4 in a 5-3 win at Burnley on April 28 after which three at home to Arsenal in a 3-3 draw per week later, ending the season with two hat-tricks in a row.

Then, on the opening day of the 1928/29 season, Everton won 3-2 away against Bolton Wanderers, with Dean scoring all three goals to finish the hat-trick of all hat-tricks. The England international then did not rating in Everton's next game against The Wednesday (now Sheffield Wednesday, who would go on to win the title).

This is the one certainly one of 4 cases of three consecutive hat-tricks spanning two seasons.

In total, Dean scored 30 hat-tricks within the English top flight, a record. Haaland has eight, so he needs 23 more to beat that mark. Dean scored a hat-trick every 12.1 games on average during his profession within the English top flight (30 in 362 appearances) and the Norwegian averages one every 8.6 games (eight in 69 games).

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Jack Balmer, for Liverpool in 1946

Opponents: Portsmouth, Derby County, Arsenal

The 1946–47 season was the primary to be accomplished within the English Football League because the outbreak of the Second World War. The top division consisted of the identical 22 clubs that had competed within the 1939–40 season, when the season was abandoned after three games per team.

Liverpool won the title for the primary time in 24 years, powered by strikers Balmer and Albert Stubbins, who each scored 24 league goals. Ten of Balmer's 24 goals (42 percent) got here in three consecutive games in November.

The then 30-year-old – Balmer is the oldest player on this list – scored all three goals in a 3-0 win over Portsmouth at Anfield on 9 November, before scoring 4 more in 17 minutes in George Kay's side's 4-1 victory at Derby per week later. Then on 23 November, Balmer accomplished a feat that nobody has been in a position to match for nearly 78 years by scoring his third consecutive hat-trick in a 4-2 home win over Arsenal.

He scored in the next away game at Blackpool and scored 4 more goals before Christmas, but his form dipped after that and from 25 December until the top of the season he scored just 4 times in 19 league games (before that date he had scored 20 goals in 20 games).

These were the one three hat-tricks ever scored by Balmer, who played his entire profession for Liverpool from 1935 to 1952 and revamped 300 appearances.

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Haaland has been on this position before.

Just before the beginning of the 2022–23 Premier League season, his first with City, he scored two consecutive hat-tricks at home against Crystal Palace and Nottingham Forest, but could only rating once in the following game, away against Aston Villa.

But with City playing at home to Brentford at 3pm on Saturday, there may be an excellent likelihood he’ll join Osborne, Jennings, Dean and Balmer. (Haaland has scored 17 goals in his 13 league games on the Etihad Stadium by that kick-off time.)

This can be a remarkable achievement that we’ll not see again anytime soon.

Now it's your turn, Erling.

Curious Kids is a show for teenagers of all ages. If you’ve gotten a matter you'd like an authority to reply, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

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How do you construct things like tunnels and bridges underwater? – Helen, age 10, Somerville, Massachusetts

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As a toddler I discovered a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip This led me to one among my burning questions: How do they know what the load limit of bridges is? Calvin's father tells him (incorrectly): “They drive over it with bigger and bigger trucks until the bridge breaks. Then they weigh the last truck and rebuild the bridge.”

Several a long time later I’m a geotechnical engineer. This implies that I work on all construction projects that involve earth. Now I do know the actual answers to the questions people ask about infrastructure. Often, like Calvin's father, they think from the incorrect direction. Engineers don’t often determine the load limit of a bridge, but somewhat construct the bridge to support the expected load.

The same goes for one more query I hear once in a while: How do engineers construct things underwater? They don't often actually construct things underwater – as a substitute they construct things that find yourself underwater. That's what I mean by that.

Building underground, under water

Sometimes you construct underwater, actually underground. It's not concerning the water you see on the surface, but what surrounds the actual structure you're constructing.

If your construction project is surrounded by rock or earth on all sides, it is mostly known as an underground construction – even when there may be a layer of water above it and you possibly can't see the rest from above.

In underground mining, powerful Tunnel boring machines to excavate soil directly. This machine is commonly called a mole for good reason. Like the animal, it digs a tunnel that resembles a burrow by digging horizontally through the soil and removing the excavated material behind it. This method could be used successfully to construct a tunnel through the soil beneath a body of water, which might then be lined and reinforced.

Using this method, the engineers were able Construction of the tunnelfor instance, a railway tunnel under the English Channel connecting England and France.

Although modern machines are quite advanced, this construction method began about 200 years ago with the Tunnel shield. Originally these were temporary support structures that provided a protected space for the employees to dig. As the tunnel grew, latest temporary structures were built deeper. As experience increased, the designs became higher and higher, the shields were built to be mobile and eventually developed into the fashionable tunnel boring machine.

Building on dry land before moving in

Some structures will ultimately be surrounded by water and rest on a river or sea floor. Fortunately, engineers have a couple of tricks up their sleeves to construct bridges and tunnels whose components are in direct contact with the water.

Underground structures are dangerous and difficult to access. Dealing with water brings additional challenges. While soil and rock could be disregarded to create a stable opening, water will all the time seep in to fill any gap and should be continually pumped out.

People, materials and machinery don't really work well underwater either. People need a continuing supply of air. Concrete pouring is difficult underwater and a few materials only work on land. And because gas engines depend on air to operate, underwater equipment may be very limited.

Some minor tasks – aligning and connecting prefabricated tunnel sections or checking that nothing has been damaged by immersion – might be carried out underwater, but the majority of the development work is unlikely to be. Once the structure is in place, constant monitoring and assessment will happen underwater.

Since it’s fundamentally unimaginable to construct underwater, there are two options: either you construct outdoors after which move the constructing underwater, otherwise you temporarily convert the underwater site right into a dry site.

In the primary option, staff often construct parts of the structure on dry land after which sink them in place. For example, the Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston was inbuilt sections in a shipyard. Workers dredged the long run tunnel path in Boston Harbor, clearing mud and other debris out of the best way. They then placed the sealed segments along the prepared trench. After the segments were connected, they opened the ends of the segments to create an extended, continuous tube. Finally, the tunnel was covered with earth and rock. Very little of the development actually took place underwater.

In other cases, comparable to in shallow water, construction staff may have the ability to construct directly from the surface. For example, staff can drive sheet metal shore retaining partitions directly into the bottom from a barge without having to divert water.

Temporary removal of water

The second option is to eliminate the underwater problem completely.

Although it’s difficult to create a dry spot on the underside of a body of water, it has an extended history. After leading the sack of Rome in 410 AD, the Visigothic King Alaric died on his way home. To protect his magnificent tomb from grave robbers, Alaric's men had temporarily diverted an area river to bury him and his prey within the riverbed before the river overflows its banks again.

Nowadays, for such a project, one would Cofferdam: a brief, watertight enclosure that could be pumped dry to create an open and protected construction site. Once the world is enclosed and the water pumped out, you’re in the world of ​​regular construction work.

Using a caisson is one other technique to create a dry area on a construction site that will normally be underwater. A caisson is often a prefabricated and waterproof structure in the form of an upside-down cup that’s sunk into the water by a crew. They keep it pressurized to make sure that no water gets in. Once the caisson is on the underside of the body of water, the air pressure and pumps keep the location dry and permit construction staff to construct inside. The caisson becomes a part of the finished structure.

construction employee constructed the pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge with caissons. Although the caissons were structurally protected, the pressure difference affected many staff, including chief engineer Washington Roebling. He contracted caisson disease – higher often known as decompression sickness – and needed to resign.

Building underwater is a posh and difficult task, but engineers have developed several ways to construct underwater…often by not constructing underwater in any respect.

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