In the last five months, two forwards have played for Liverpool. One is a Hanna-Barbera character. His boots are two sizes too big. His slow movements in and around the penalty area – a patch of grass that seems to alternately turn to ice or quicksand under his feet – are accompanied by the circus music of a american photoplayer. He carries a passing resemblance for Andy Carroll. He has a nasty habit of galloping past everyone and then being surprised by the space he is in and generally plays his position as if you get partial credit for hitting the struts behind the net.
The other of the two forwards literally finished it off by scoring in Liverpool’s 2-2 draw in the FA Cup last weekend. He now has a tally of 10 goals in all competitions this season, which would make him the team’s second-highest goalscorer. He pretty much does all the things he’s supposed to do. He runs constantly, and you almost never say he had no effect on the match. He’s the kind of enterprising, action-packed player that Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp seems to like. He often sneaks into the last quarterback’s blind spot, making himself a nuisance to the back line, and does very well when given decent service. When the game isn’t building up on defense as well or as fast as Liverpool would like, he comes in and takes the ball forward.
The curiosity here is that these attackers are wearing the no. shirt number 27, and they are the same 23-year-old man. Darwin Núñez joined from Benfica in the summer for £85m after a debut season in which he more than quadrupled his Primeira Liga tally from the previous season (from six to 26) and helped the Portuguese side take Liverpool themselves to the brink of elimination in a 10-goal Champions League thriller. This summer, it looked like Núñez was joining England’s perennial second best team, a team that had just arrived a hair of the Quadruple– which no English team has yet done. But over the course of this year’s campaign, Liverpool have started to look like a team looking to stay relevant. They are 16 points adrift of Premier League leaders Arsenal, leaving usual rivals Manchester City behind, and just limping into an FA Cup third-round replay against a team who are second from bottom.
As a show of strength and presence after a dismal 3-1 defeat by Brenford in the Premier League last week, Klopp fielded a strong squad in an effort to retain at least one of Liverpool’s trophies from last season. New Wolves coach Julen Lopetegui is still complained beforehand that your team would have two days less to prepare for the match – a classic tactic to lower expectations when facing a team you clearly expect to lose to. But Wolves didn’t lose. In the 26th minute, Liverpool seemed to have suddenly connection lost; Wolves’ first goal by Gonçalo Guedes was gifted to him by a stunned Alisson who flicked the ball directly into the striker’s path. That was because the normally confident Thiago Alacantra tried some lazy steps on the edge of his own penalty area.
But back to Núñez, who a few minutes earlier had attempted an outrageous overshot of a ball deflected from the foot of a Wolves defender, who had taken something between a pass and a shot from Mohamed Salah. A chance out of nowhere. There is a temptation in the neutral spectator to suggest that, had this happened – a feline display of athleticism, which Núñez is capable of but has not yet utilized enough for Liverpool, it could have been the start of something especially for the Uruguayan. Some sort of uncontrollable snowball moment eventually resulted in their “world class” and “club legend” status. Until then, according to inhabitants of the internethe is a failure.
It’s not his fault that he reached the Premier League at the same time as Erling Haaland, who has scored 21 league goals this season for Liverpool’s northwest rivals. It’s hard to ignore that, on the contrary, Núñez leads the championship for some distance in “big missed chances” for 90 minutes. Liverpool’s defense of this statistic is that to miss big chances, one must first enter dangerous positions, which is the kind of creative accounting that follows the Uruguayan who, again, is 23 years old. title push, taken directly from a soda ad. He’s broad-shouldered, nearly six feet, religiously committed to the press, and has all the necessary tattoos. He wreaks the most havoc in the channel, but is capable of winning with his head and bringing Liverpool’s most creative midfield elements into the game.
These sorts of discussions about Núñez’s ability will likely continue until he scores five goals against Real Madrid. Klopp says he sees “a lot of similarities” between the Uruguayan and Robert Lewandowski, who coached at Dortmund when Lewandowski won an identical feat. Of course, the comparison was to illustrate how far Núñez can go: “We had filming sessions where he didn’t finish one.”
Liverpool have bigger concerns, namely their defence: once well-run and impregnable, they have conceded almost as many Premier League goals as they did in all of last season, and centre-back Virgil Van Dijk is sidelined with a significant injury in the tendon. Without solidity at the back, how can Liverpool throw everything forward and put teams to the sword like they used to?
That makes moments of perfect synergy, like Núñez’s 45th-minute FA Cup goal, even more frustrating. After a wrong break, Trent Alexander-Arnold shot into space down the right flank. Núñez fired, raising his hand for a pass into the center circle, past the Wolves defenders. Alexander-Arnold sent a perfect cross early on, beating all defenders, catching the goalkeeper in no man’s land. Without breaking stride, Núñez casually rolled the cross of his shin into the opposite corner.
In the second half, he was anonymous.
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