When Liverpool lost Roberto Firmino at the end of his career in England, it was the right call to move him on. The Brazilian was picking up more injuries and hadn’t played such a big role in the months leading up to his departure.
Cody Gakpo was trialed as a false nine but now under a new head coach, Arne Slot has put an end to that experiment. Aside from the experiment against Brighton where Curtis Jones and Dominik Szoboszlai played as a front two, it has been Darwin Nunez or Diogo Jota deployed as the Reds’ number nine.
Through a mixture of injury and a lack of form in front of goal, the striking pair only have seven goals between them so far this season. Mohamed Salah, as a comparison, has 10 on his own.
Much of the reason for that is that this season, Liverpool has seen a different version of Nunez. Once shot-hungry but offering little in terms of link-up or elite pressing, he has now reversed.
The numbers back up the eye test: Nunez has been dropping deeper and doing more of the defensive work, racing back to help win possession. That was the very first thing that he did when he came on against Chelsea, sensing an opportunity to take on the Jota role when the Portugal forward went off with an injury and showing that he was listening to Slot’s demands.
Nunez is putting in tackles and making interceptions at a far greater level than ever before at Liverpool on a per 90 minute basis. His passing accuracy was just 64 per cent in his first season at Liverpool but is now at over 75 per cent. He is a much more rounded player in almost every way.
But there is a much more stark difference even than those defensive numbers: last season, Nunez averaged a shot every 18 minutes on the field in the Premier League. This season, he is shooting at a rate of one every 38 minutes. That is still quite a lot but for someone who often needs to take four or five shots before finding the back of the net, his goalscoring numbers have been impacted.
Nunez has only scored twice in the Premier League this season — against Bournemouth and Aston Villa — and on both occasions, he missed far bigger opportunities to score than the ones he took. For every superb goal or composed assist like the crucial one at the Emirates Stadium to set up Salah’s equalizer, there is a glaring miss.
The consistency in front of goal is lacking but there is progress. It should be noted, too, that it is impossible for a striker to do the dropping deep and pick up as many touches in the opposition penalty area that Nunez was doing last season. That explains the decline in that regard; even Firmino didn’t manage that for the majority of his Liverpool career.
But Liverpool does need more from Nunez in terms of output in addition to his extra influence elsewhere. Firmino, at his peak, offered goals and assists as well as the link-up play and defensive contribution.
And while the Brazilian was not always the complete striker at Liverpool, he wasn’t a club-record signing like Nunez is. Rightly or wrongly, there is a pressure to deliver good goalscoring numbers when you are a number nine who cost $109m (£85m/€100m).
There is pressure from Jota, too, given that he is expected to be back in action in the next couple of weeks. There is a reason that it was the former Wolves man who started the season in the starting XI and he will be keen to show that again as soon as possible.
“I still see a lot of room for improvement,” Slot said of Nunez recently. “But the first thing, and the most important thing, is that his attitude is right and he wants to work.” The link-up play and the work ethic for the team isn’t an issue. Sooner rather than later, though, the goals need to start to flow as well.
