Luis Garcia backs Darwin Nunez to come good in a ‘full, flowing Liverpool’ side: ‘He’s very very clever’
Nunez #Nunez
This weekend two great rivals fallen on hard times with painful rebuilding projects looming large over them and a sense that a clash that once could define a season is now the sideshow to bigger games taking place elsewhere face off. For once this is not an intro to be deployed as Arsenal play against Manchester United but instead for this weekend’s other big six showdown, Liverpool’s clash with Chelsea at Anfield.
Of course, the decline has not been quite as vertiginous, and these two sides may not spend quite as long in the doldrums as the great rivals from the 1990s and early 2000s. Chelsea are still less than two years removed from being the club game’s world champions even if their Champions League win feels like a distant memory. And Liverpool are less than a year removed from a season where they took their bid for silverware in every competition down to the last moments of the last games, taking home only the FA Cup despite being a few fortunate breaks away from the quadruple.
These two teams carry the scars of their 63 game seasons. “Last year was draining,” said Liverpool legend Luis Garcia of his former club on CBS Sports’ House of Champions podcast. “They are exhausted, physically and mentally. They are tired. They are injured.” Perhaps the solution to what ails them is nothing more than a few quieter years after slugging it out with Manchester City. If so they may well be about to get the medicine for what ails them.”
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Getting back to those showpiece events looks like quite the challenge for both sides. Going into Saturday’s early game ninth and 10th in the Premier League, 10 points behind fourth, it is not unreasonable to assume that defeat could be a deathblow for either side’s hopes of returning to the Champions League through the top four (would anyone say with absolute certainty that Liverpool in particular cannot get their act together and win it all on the European stage?)
The similarities between these two faltering titans are not inconsiderable. Both seem to populate their defenses with players who are a little too old or a little too young. Midfields that were once the envy of Europe are hamstrung by injuries. Then there is the forward lines, expensively assembled but riddled with questions marks.
Chelsea’s issue is writ large on the Premier League table. Graham Potter’s squad as a whole have combined to replicate Erling Haaland’s Manchester City output of 22 goals. Their average of 1.24 non-penalty expected goals (npxG) per game is the 10th best mark in the Premier League. For all the money Todd Boehly and Clearlake Capital threw at their frontline, there is no obvious answer to the question of who in that squad scores more than 15 goals in a top flight season. Raheem Sterling if he’s playing for Manchester City? Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang if it’s 2018? This is no new issue but £235 million over the last 18 months has done nothing to solve it.
For Liverpool, the attacking issues might not look quite that serious, certainly compared to the issues they are suffering with and without Virgil van Dijk at the other end of the pitch. A return of 34 goals from 18 games is reasonable, hardly scoring to the standards of their best years under Jurgen Klopp but the fifth best tally in the league. Their 1.89 npxG is the second highest mark in the league, according to Twenty3, who have them slightly ahead of Manchester City.
But if one were to sail into the statistically dubious waters of discounting the 9-0 win over Bournemouth in August — the sort of freak occasion that necessitates its own Wikipedia page — then the picture becomes a little less clear. In the other 17 matches they are scoring at a rate less than a goal and a half a game. Open play xG of 1.28 is notably down on the 1.53 of last season, whilst the number of shots a game drop from 19.2 to 16.5.
Liverpool’s own attacking performances are rather like those of the talismanic Mohamed Salah. There is still greatness in there, but it is observable rather less frequently. It is perhaps too early to say this is a player or an attack in terminal decline but there are signs of what could be a post-peak period.
The great question is whether they have the forwards ready to succeed the Salah, now-departed Sadio Mane, and Roberto Firmino triumvirate. It remains fascinatingly unknowable. Injuries have hampered Luis Diaz and Diogo Jota. There are question marks as to what happens when an attacker like Cody Gakpo on an overperforming hot streak in the Eredivisie tries to translate that form to the Premier League. Then there is Darwin Nunez. There may be no player in the Premier League who invites such invigorating debate, at least until battle lines are drawn at the extreme ends.
At his best he electrifies an occasion, turning a contest in an instant as he did in his top flight debut against Fulham. He leads the league in shots per 90 by a chasmic margin — he averages 5.66, ahead of Aleksandar Mitrovic at 4.72 and Erling Haaland at 4.33 — but is also the (unoficially at least) top flight leader in “what was he trying to do there moments?” You cannot take your eyes off him.
Those are not always the players you can feel certain you want to build around for a decade and yet Garcia is in no doubt that Nunez will be the man. “The way that he plays is special. He’s not the No.9 we were all expecting, he’s not the No.11 on the left side. It’s different and he needs freedom to move, to sometimes go on the left side and make diagonals. That’s not something that Liverpool had in the past few years when you could see that 4-3-3 formation at every single moment in the game, everybody was in their position, there was not much freedom. He needs it.
“I’ve seen some of the runs he makes, they’re fantastic. He’s very, very clever. He gives good assists, good movement, good passes. The finish we saw the other day [against Wolverhampton Wanderers] was fantastic.
“He will come good. There is a lot of pressure on the team right now. He arrived to a team that is going down. We aren’t seeing a Liverpool that is on the up. He arrived at a moment that the press is not the best — they don’t have the same legs we saw before — so he needs to put in extra effort every time. But he’s tall, he’s very good in the air, aggressive, good with his feet. It will take time. Probably next season he will be at his best. It will come.”
It might help, Garcia notes, if Nunez did not feel obliged to do so much beyond scoring. In part his tendency to drift wide and attack from the left is merely representatives of his game, but it is fair to ask whether Liverpool’s own struggles creating chances mean that the Uruguayan feels compelled to do more than a player like Haaland or Mitrovic, who focus on occupying defenders in the penalty area. Nunez creates more than one and a half shooting opportunities for teammates per 90 and only four players (Kevin De Bruyne, Bruno Fernandes, Kieran Trippier and Trent Alexander-Arnold) average more big chances created for others.
There will be those who see the missed chances, the moments of madness and weigh them more heavily than the statistical profile. A fine support striker he might be but is he the terror of defenses? “It’ll come,” insists Garcia, who sees shade of a former team mate who was the Premier League’s most feared forward in Liverpool red. “He reminds me of Fernando Torres. When he was at Atletico Madrid he scored 13 goals a year, that’s it, for four or five years. No one was expecting much.
“We thought he doesn’t keep the ball much, he’s not a good finisher. Any team mate will tell you there were a lot of doubts when he arrived in the Premier League. Then suddenly he scored 35 goals. Why? Because that team was in full flow, one of the best teams Fernando Torres could ask for. The players behind gave him the freedom to play. They allowed him to trust himself, suddenly he started finishing like [Gabriel] Batistuta.
“We need to give [Nunez] the chance of being in a full flowing Liverpool. If he cannot finish then, we’ll see.” When we will get to see the £85 million in that sort of ecosystem is rather an open question when the midfield needs refreshing and the cornerstones of recent greatness might be in their post prime period.
Perhaps then that is the context in which to see Nunez, not as the man who can keep the good times rolling in the era of Salah, Van Dijk and Alisson but one of the foundational pieces of the next team. In that context it is rather less of a concern that he is not delivering Haaland-esque numbers right at this very moment. He is at least showing the tendencies of a player who could in years to come.
Liverpool, then, know what they have going forward. Chelsea, for all their expenditure, do not.