Núñez With Mojo (and Mo, Jo & Gakpo) Means Calmness Amid Chaos – Analysing Liverpool's Strikers

Deep dive on the Reds' strikers and the art of finishing – both last season, and across their careers

I loved Darwin Núñez last preseason, and in the early months of the campaign; even into the early spring.

But it slowly dawned on me that no matter how he played (and it was either great, indifferent or ugly), Liverpool generally seemed less cohesive; certainly with him as the no.9.

I saw him in the flesh starting three times at Anfield (each as the 9) and he was a mixed bag; but each time Liverpool lacked fluency. He looked like a wonderful square peg in a round hole, whereas Cody Gakpo looked fully rounded, if not as explosive.

Núñez also wasted more xG than almost anyone ever has, but that didn't bother me too much. Performance against xG comes and goes (as I will show), albeit Gakpo is a freak in that he has a career of consistently overshooting it, unlike any other Liverpool striker of recent times. (And the public data only goes back to 2017 anyway.)

Striker Scatter – Finishing Ability

Finishing data 2017-2023. Graphic as of last spring, from which point Jota moved up towards neutral (dotted line), career-wise, with a lot of goals for low xG. League goals only.

The higher up, the better the finishing against expected goals. The further to the right, the more goals per 90.

Núñez will on average get more chances than Gakpo, as he's a Shot Monster who goes through the middle (and who actually looks lost when he drops deep, but can also look lost when all he tries to do is run in behind and there’s no support and no pass to him on); Gakpo will convert more from a lower sample, and both ended up as one-in-three scorers.

Núñez created chances for others with his pace, especially out wide, but Gakpo knitted things together in the way that Roberto Firmino always had, and exceeded Firmino – a classic one-in-three scorer with Liverpool and Brazil – within the 99th percentile for tackles per 90 (as a proxy of pressing, which is vital to the way Jürgen Klopp's forwards must play), whereas Núñez was mid-level, and wayward. Gakpo is an elite presser, who of course, can also play as a winger and a no.8 if required.

By the end of last season I would have considered selling Núñez to fund the midfield rebuild (who knew the Reds would get £52m plus add-ons for two ageing midfielders?!), especially as he hadn't learnt English and looked to be regressing; but equally, as I said at the start of the summer, if he could be moulded to the way the Reds need to play (and only the coaching staff would know the probability of that), then obviously his talents could come to the fore.

It's not that he's a ‘shit Andy Carroll’, as he’s far better than Carroll; it’s that he's an emotional player who tried too hard at times, and looked confused at others. But at his best, he was a force of nature. For all the joyous chaos of his pace and movement, the key to any sport is to be calm in the moment of execution. Less pressure and noise this season may help, as will learning English.

Then there's the question of if he's better suited to playing away games, as the Reds may be on the break a bit more (ditto being a sub for when leading). He can play in the box, but his best moments, as in this preseason, have often come on the break (with a nice touch that Mo Salah seems to play him in with precision, perhaps unable himself to burst forward quite as quickly).

I deep-dived a lot of data at the end of the season regarding finishing vs xG (for a piece that I'm now delivering here), but also the all-round striker data.

An issue, as I will show, was that so many of Liverpool's attackers (and midfielders) undershot their xG. Or rather, the two main goalscorers did so, wasting record numbers of big chances.

Weirdly, Firmino, Gakpo, Díaz, Jones and, very belatedly, Diogo Jota (a notoriously streaky finisher), exceeded their xG – Jota went from awful figures to excellent figures with a burst of goals – but each only played chunks of the season.

In other words, good chances were missed at a rate that left the Reds with fewer goals than expected, which in turn with the slow midfield, put the defence under more pressure (as game-state was rarely made comfortable). I've found a really clear way of showing this, which I'll share along with other analysis.

As such, if the career-proven finishers like Gakpo and Díaz (both smaller quantities but less wasteful finishers) can be joined in above-par seasons in xG terms from the Shot Monsters (Núñez and Salah), things could get very interesting, before even considering the goal threat now emerging from midfield in Jones (maturing), Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai (while Harvey Elliott showed his finishing skills at Blackburn, and in the cups last season; aged just 19 when scoring them, he passed the all-comps best figure posted by Jordan Henderson in a season in the Jürgen Klopp era, for comparison, despite only playing about half the available minutes).

The majority of this article is for paying TTT Main Hub subscribers only.