It didn’t take long for the international break to confirm Liverpool’s worst fears. In one of the first fixtures, Andy Robertson was forced off with a shoulder injury, immediately throwing a spanner in the works at Anfield.
Even if Jürgen Klopp’s men had made it through the break injury-free, he would still have had a headache. Once again, Liverpool has the early kick-off slot straight after the internationals — last time that happened, a fatigued Alexis Mac Allister was hooked at half-time, while Darwin Núñez and Luis Díaz were omitted from the starting line-up altogether after late returns from South America.
What that means for the Liverpool team to take on Everton next weekend remains to be seen. But if Klopp is looking for the slightest of silver linings, Núñez did at least get a confidence-boosting moment last night while away with Uruguay, scoring a last-minute equalizer to claim a point against Díaz and Colombia.
It came from the spot, and it was only ‘last-minute’ thanks to a delay of around five minutes between the foul and the penalty. Colombia’s onrushing goalkeeper needed to pick himself up, and then he needed to be sent off, which then prompted a substitution. The wait must have tested Núñez’s nerve.
He did not show it. Núñez slammed the ball into the top-right corner; the goalkeeper went the right way, but got nowhere near it.
As it turns out, Núñez has a perfect penalty record: 13 taken, 13 scored, with Marc-André ter Stegen the most prestigious goalkeeper beaten from the spot. With his latest emphatic reminder, he may just have reignited a Mohamed Salah question.
With three misses this year, there have been questions about whether Salah is truly the most appropriate penalty-taker for Liverpool. It did not help that two of those came in quick succession, shortly after the Egyptian had admitted to Steven Gerrard that he ‘hates’ taking spot kicks.
But Salah kept the role at the start of the new campaign, and has since put a lid on any talk of being replaced, scoring his last two penalties. That lifts his overall record outside of shootouts up to 34 scored, eight missed.
In percentage terms, that’s more or less an 81 per cent success rate. Expected goals models, which draw on a huge sample, suggest penalties tend to be scored about 78 per cent of the time (The Athletic), meaning Salah is actually a little way above average.
At this point, some would point out that Núñez has a perfect record. Perfect is better than above average. But while going 13/13 is very impressive, the sample size is far smaller than Salah’s, and it would be fair to expect a regression to the mean.
Indeed, while the psychology of penalties is a murky business, it would be reasonable to speculate that the very act of replacing Salah with Núñez (or indeed anyone else) would pile on the pressure, leading to more misses. Ultimately, Liverpool will be pleased to be hovering at and around the average, because it means nothing is going wrong.
How many times have we seen self-inflicted circuses around penalties? Manchester City went through a spell where it seemed the whole team missed one, as Pep Guardiola sought perfection and inadvertently created a weakness instead.
So for as long as Salah is at Liverpool, he is the taker, and rightly so. But if and when he does move on, Klopp at least knows he has a queue of worthy replacements.