Liverpool’s Finishing Is Fine. Being the Better Team is What Counts

To have scored 127 goals by early April suggests no major issue

The most important thing in football is creating chances, as without them, you’re less likely to score; and without scoring you’re less likely to win.

The converting of those chances, however, is often random. It comes and goes.

And luck plays a huge role; see the two first-half goals Real Madrid scored against Man City last night, with two really harmless shots that both deflected in.

Then, four more goals in the game, each from almost zero-chance of scoring.

You can have specialist finishers, but specialists are no good if the moves break down before getting to them, or they just give the ball away, or don’t link play.

The main thing: be a good football team. Do good football team things, and the finishing gods will reward you more often than not if you pile up xG without conceding too much at the other end; but you’ll always have high-xG-low-conversion days, and days where the opposition have two chances and score two goals.

Don’t try and get by on just 40% possession, whilst conceding 20-30 shots, and hope to score on the break. That’s not sustainable. Don’t be a bad football team, looking to win games by luck alone.

Of Arsenal, not so long ago we heard “that lot don’t know how to score”, despite the individuals, er, knowing how to score.

Go back in time, and Martin Ødegaard scored goals. Kai Havertz scored goals. Bukayo Saka scored goals. Gabriel Jesus scored goals. Gabriel Martinelli scored goals. Leandro Trossard scored goals. And for a backup, Eddie Nketiah scored a few goals too.

None of them are pure goalscorers; goal-beasts. But they could score goals.

Erling Haaland is a goal beast, but Man City were a better “team” before he arrived, and seem better when he’s missing (indeed, in big games he often roams around, doing nothing, and looking like he’s missing whilst also being gigantic; yet he’s without doubt the best finisher around, based on career xG over-performance).

And if you do genuinely rely on just one player to get most of your goals, if he’s marked out the game, or injured, or has an off-day, then that’s all your eggs in that basket.

Months later, Arsenal suddenly score lots of goals. Or enough goals. No one has yet reached 20 in all competitions for them, and only four are in double figures in all competitions.

Now Liverpool, suddenly, aren’t “ruthless”; can’t take enough of their chances.

Yet Liverpool’s 5th-top scorer this season, Luis Díaz, has scored as many as Arsenal’s second-top scorer, and Diogo Jota, despite missing many months, has 14 goals, as does the 5th-choice attacker, Cody Gakpo. Darwin Núñez has as many as Arsenal’s top scorer. Mo Salah has more.

The midfield has scored, in technical terms, a shit-ton of goals, too.

Now, there’s perhaps a lack of ruthlessness in the Reds’ finishing at times, but Diogo Jota, who has been über dead-eyed for more than twelve months, went almost a year without scoring before the run-in last season, since when he’s been ultra-prolific per 90.

He couldn’t score; then he couldn’t stop. That’s football.

Liverpool 1.0 broke the club record with 147 goals in 2021/22, but with up to 12 games still to go, are already on 127. At the current rate they’ll surpass it.

And this has been achieved with Mo Salah missing months, Jota missing months, chief-creator Trent Alexander-Arnold missing months (along with 1-2 month spells out for Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Curtis Jones and others); and since December, a bunch of kids almost always filling in somewhere.

Thiago Alcantara, another creative genius, has played about two minutes; ditto Stefan Bajcetic, the best all-round young player at the club. The best attacking youngster, Ben Doak, has been out now for half a season.

At the other end, Alisson has played fewer games than Caoimhín Kelleher.

(I laughed at Steve McManaman saying City really “need to get bodies back”, referring to … Kyle Walker, who, along with Nathan Aké, was the only player not fit enough to be in the City squad last night; what a deep injury crisis that is. Yes, get all those bodies back, all two of them.)

But in the highest-pressure games, finishing always gets harder; just as mistakes at the back are more likely. That’s sport – the more pressure, the more tension in the body, the more clouds in the mind, even (at times) for the very best.

You can’t alter the way you play to factor in the fear, or you just play anti-football, which now guarantees mediocrity.

Not being ruthless was a problem in Kiev in 2018, in Paris in 2022. In both the Chelsea 2022 cup finals; all with the old 1.0 strikers. Go back to finishing as runners-up with 92 and 97 points, and you can find games where blanks were drawn; the games where “the title was lost”, as if there won’t always be games where you fail to score, and to get 92 or 97 points meant more wins and fewer defeats than most title winners prior to 2018.

Roberto Firmino was famously unreliable in front of goal, and no less loveable or brilliant all the same.

Even long before the United game, I’d said that Luis Díaz is genuinely the best improvisational 6-yard box finisher I’ve seen at the club. I’ve never seen someone readjust so fast, and fling himself to make contact. But he’ll never be a dead-eye prime-years Ian Rush. Even prime-years Mo Salah only had one season of ruthless finishing (the rest was scoring 20-30 goals from a ton of chances including 5-8 penalties), and the Reds won the title when he was at his least ruthless.

Last season I noted that in many big games, goals from distance were the difference, in an age of an increasing desire to shoot closer to goal. That’s why I was all for some long-range thunderbastard blasters, and Mac Allister and Szoboszlai haven’t let us down. I was lucky enough to have a side-on view last week when Mac thumped one into the Kop net, when it looked like a goal wasn’t on the cards.

Indeed, as football gets more open and “playground”-like (as I saw it described yesterday), I went back, before the Madrid vs City game ended 3-3, to look at high-pressure games over recent times, and the majority of cup finals ended as very low-scoring, perhaps in part due to everyone being a bit more anxious.

Even in well-matched Big Six clashes you now often see tons of goals (2-2s, 3-3s, 4-3s, even 4-4s), but pressure plays a part when everything is at stake. Liverpool had the burden of pressure at Old Trafford. Man City and Man United can play out 6-3s, but not in cup finals.

Cup finals have almost all been really low-scoring in the last 4-5 years. The last four Champions League finals have been 1-0, and the domestic cups aren’t much different.

To me, everything up to and including semi-finals in the modern game now seems more free-flowing and open, but the finals more nervy; the finishing understandably less clinical. When you feel you have to win, you can just get a little anxious.

The best handle the pressure better, but the best are not robots.

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