As Liverpool took another blow in their quest to return to the top of the English Premier League football, in Saturday’s 3-3 draw against Brighton, Uruguayan striker Darwin Nunez sat on the bench for 89 minutes in a fantastic deal with a fantastic deal.
After coming from Benfica on a $73m deal that could top $100m based on his red team career, Nunes found himself captivated on the bench despite a shaky start for German coach Jurgen Klopp’s team.
Liverpool have won three of their first nine games of the season in all competitions and are 11 points clear of league leaders Arsenal as they need to catch up at the Champions League start.
After losing to Napoli Italy with a big record outside his bases (1-4), he snatched a late win from his Dutch guest Ajax Amsterdam (2-1) ahead of Tuesday’s match against his guest, ” Glasgow Rangers from Scotland. .
Nunez scored two goals in his first two matches as Liverpool beat Premier League champions Manchester City in the Community Shield to draw 2–2 with Fulham in the first season.
But he has since missed the net and started one match after being sent off in his first home game when he was knocked down by Danish Crystal Palace defender Joachim Andersen last August.
Hope remains that Darwin will follow in the footsteps of fellow Scottish left-back Andrew Robertson and Brazilian midfielder Fabinho, who took months to adapt to Klopp’s demands before becoming a solid cornerstone by winning the Reds in the 2019 Champions League, and then English Premier League 2020.
But the 23-year-old’s inability to impose himself, as Norway’s Erling Haaland did with Manchester City, for example, shows the difficulty of Liverpool’s task of tightening the noose on their rival, Manchester City, the four-time league champions. over the past five years and continuing to compete in the Champions League as he has reached the final three times in the past five seasons.
– Small error –
In seven seasons for Klopp at Anfield and six seasons for Pep Guardiola at the Etihad with City, Liverpool have spent less than half of the Premier League signings on new players.
The Reds’ near-perfect hiring policy kept them in contention for the title, as they did last season when they challenged for a historic quartet in England, until the final two games of a grueling 63-game season.
But the desire of US club owners Fenway Sports Group to keep the balance sheet could put them in a narrow margin of error in the transfer market compared to other wealthy clubs such as City, Manchester United and Chelsea.
Questions began to arise about whether the money spent on hiring Nunes should be invested in updating an aging midfield.
But any talk of Liverpool’s poverty against local rivals will dissipate this week when he faces Rangers, who are financially far from Premier League clubs.
Nunes’ transfer alone surpassed the Scottish club’s entire £54m turnover in the 2020-21 season.
Despite reaching the Europa League final last season, Rangers are enjoying their first Champions League appearance in 12 years.
Source: El Iktisad