by Football is a simple game, but it is also a complicated game and sometimes the biggest difficulty is working out how complicated it is. As the intricate details of their inner workings reveal and inform increasingly complex schemes of repression and counter-repression, so at the same time the brightest and clearest observations take on a strange depth: “What they need is someone to put the ball in. clean.”
At the highest level, the data has a huge impact on processes and has led to controversial changes in perspective. Take, say, Brighton’s 2-2 draw with Liverpool in October when all four goals (one via penalty) resulted from turnovers after the ball was won high up the pitch.
Even a few years ago the assumption was that this was the result of carelessness on all sides. This time, it was clear that possession was not so much lost as the usual report, but that it was won back. These were goals that arose not from mistakes but from transitions that encouraged the improvement of the team that got the ball back.
Pep Guardiola spends days analyzing his opponents, looking for the little vulnerabilities in their defensive set-ups, working out where he can create overloads or generate pockets of space for Manchester City’s creators to operate. Everything is analyzed, everything is pressed to maximize efficiency while exploiting the opponents. inefficiencies. There is extraordinary sophistication. And yet the old truths are still untrue: sometimes it really helps someone to be able to score goals.
The question of what should be a centre-forward is one that, in different ways, Arsenal and Liverpool have shown this season. For Arsenal, the question is whether a team can mount a realistic title challenge without a top-class goalscorer. The answer is yes, of course: he now has Erling Haaland, but Guardiola has often won titles without an orthodox striker and never seemed fully convinced of Sergio Agüero’s merits.
The opposite is also true: Harry Kane has scored 23 goals in 19 Bundesliga games this season, but Bayern are second in the table. Over-reliance on one scorer may have a foreseeable threat of negatively impacting other processes. But still, with Arsenal losing three league games in December while having a higher xG than their opponents, one couldn’t help but wonder how credible their title challenge would have been with someone to beat the odds. they were creating to convert.
Gabriel Jesus is very forward. His movement is excellent and he is diligent in his defensive work. It does a lot of what is good about Arsenal’s function; if he were to change, it wouldn’t be a simple case of slipping in a more reliable goalscorer and expecting everything to stay the same, just more goals.
The fact remains that Jesus is not a great finisher. He has never scored more than 14 goals in a league season and has reached double figures in three of his seven seasons in Europe. Even after scoring at Nottingham Forest on Tuesday, he ranks 505th out of 532 players in the Premier League for goals minus xG (penalties excluded), a rough measure of striking efficiency. It may not matter if his main aim is to create spaces for others and they provide the goals, but Bukayo Saka, the club’s leading scorer in the league with seven, is 463rd in that metric. Set pieces aside, Arsenal are a team that needs a lot of chances to score goals.
However, so does Liverpool centre-forward Darwin Núñez. He has seven league goals this season, but sits 24 places below Jesus in that goal minus xG list, ahead of Nicolas Jackson, Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Yehor Yarmolyuk, the 19-year-old Brentford midfielder who has a new career yet to be made. give a goal.
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To some extent that is because of his amazing ability to hit the woodwork: doing so four times against Chelsea on Wednesday took his scores for the season to 12. The understanding is that at some point his luck has gone and on at least some of those. efforts will go into the end. He has a hitter who could suddenly come in and produce a 20 or 30 goal season. But then the same thing was said about another persistent woodwork winner, Timo Werner, and it didn’t quite work out for him.
But it doesn’t seem to matter: for Núñez what that metric shows is the amount of chances he creates – even if he misses a lot of them. There is something unusual about the apparent impregnability of his self-confidence, it seems that the way to lose his concern: go again, fail again, fail again, score … and again.
It’s not just about the goals, which almost comes as a bonus. Núñez is relentless, invincible, a constant burst of energy and physicality, creating space. His unpredictability – he’s as likely to curl a shot into the top corner from 30 yards as he is to miss an open net out of five – defenders can’t rest anywhere near him.
He has seven league assists this season, more than anyone other than Mohammed Salah, Kieran Trippier and Ollie Watkins, and four more than Jesus. In that sense perhaps his profligacy does not matter; Núñez is almost the embodiment of Jürgen Klopp’s ideal of high-octane football.
Except for troubling thoughts that occur. Imagine a situation in a crucial Europa League game, or against Manchester City at Anfield next month, or even at the Emirates on Sunday, assuming he succeeds. It’s a very tight game, not many chances either. He has been goalless of late. Liverpool are defending, they win the ball back and break. Núñez is played three-on-one. Do you back him to score? He may be so adept at spreading chaos that he creates chances even against top opposition but it could just as easily be that history remembers one notable failure and decides that a title was lost without a striker .
But then maybe it’s because of all the other work he does – or Jesus – that he’s earned a title. How simple a game of football is is a complex question.
