“Resiliencia!”, wrote Darwin Nunez in his native Spanish on social media last week, after appearing for just over half-an-hour in his second pre-season friendly since joining Liverpool from Benfica earlier this summer.
Nunez’s English might require work but the single word statement didn’t really need a translation. Having been criticised by some fans online for his performance in the 4-0 defeat to Manchester United in Thailand, his involvement in the 2-0 victory over Crystal Palace in Singapore was relatively limited, and the same critics were quick to question both his overall level of talent and suitability for the Liverpool system.
That a 22-year-old footballer felt the need to publicly defend himself from scathing reviews after around an hour’s worth of play in exhibition fixtures demonstrates not only the bizarre joylessness of contemporary online sports discourse, but also the pressure the player is putting on himself to perform when the season starts for real.
Of course, that pressure is understandable. At an initial fee of £64m, Nunez knows he is an expensive purchase, and that he is joining a team which is looking to hit the ground running in order to compete on four fronts once again as it did in the last campaign.
What’s more, the club which so narrowly beat his new employers to last season’s Premier League title has conducted a revamp of its own attack, with Manchester City signing Erling Haaland and Julian Alvarez in order to replace Raheem Sterling and Gabriel Jesus.
Now, two clubs who have fought one another so fervently across the past five seasons will both enter the new campaign with their frontlines focused on traditional strikers, rather than the free-floating central forwards who have defined their attacking templates for so long.
The difference between Nunez and Roberto Firmino or the outgoing Sadio Mane in the centre of the attack could hardly be starker for Liverpool.
In Singapore in particular, while Nunez was looking to run off the shoulders of Crystal Palace defenders in order to played in behind, his team-mates were often waiting for him to come deep to pick up possession so that they could find him with short passes as they have done with Firmino and Mane for years.
The fact that Nunez and his colleagues were on different wavelengths so soon after his arrival is entirely understandable, but emphasises just how profound a shift Jurgen Klopp is making to his attacking by implementing the Uruguayan in it.
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Mane for example received an average of 40 passes per match last season, as well as making an average of 12 progressive passes (among the 99th percentile of forwards in the division) and completing 75 per cent of his passes. Simply put, team-mates were looking to give Mane possession very often because he was comfortable on the ball in the centre of the attack and was adept at contributing to the start of attacks.
Nunez, on the other hand, received around 21 passes on average, made only one progressive pass per match, and completed just 54 per cent of his passes with Benfica. None of this means Nunez is a bad footballer, and of course his former colleagues were not quite as talented as his new team-mates, but the strengths Mane offered are totally different, and therefore every Liverpool player is going to have to treat him very differently indeed.
Evidently Nunez himself will improve as he becomes accustomed to his new surroundings, to the language, and to the methods of one of world football’s great player coaches. But more important is the adaptation that the rest of the Liverpool squad makes to him, rather than he to them.
While Firmino could well start the season as Liverpool’s striker, and City have options including Phil Foden and Kevin De Bruyne as false nines, both Nunez and Haaland have been purchased by Klopp and Pep Guardiola respectively because both managers believe the sheer scale of their talent justifies altering their tactical blueprints. That is an enormous signal of confidence in their abilities and should reassure both players as they settle into their new squads.
The fact that both play with a similar style, have been signed for comparable transfer fees, and are arriving in English football at the same time to play for two of the best teams the country has ever produced means that their individual success will no doubt be judged relative to one another during at least their first seasons in the Premier League and potentially beyond.
What will define next season’s title race though is not really the individual performances of either man, but rather how quickly their respective managers are to able to set their teams up to best harness their skills and goalscoring. If one starts the season scoring and the other does not, that means one set of players has adapted faster than the other, and that team will potentially have a huge advantage in the title race.
When Liverpool won the Premier League in 2019-20, they had run up such a massive lead in the early stages of the season that they essentially had the whole thing wrapped up before the winter.
With the World Cup set to split the upcoming campaign in two when it begins in November, whichever of Manchester City and Liverpool is able to embrace their shiny new strikers earliest could well have one hand on the trophy by then.
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