Mohamed Salah can take the pressure off Darwin Núñez by fixing hidden Liverpool problem
Darwin Núñez might have been a Premier League player for less than half a season but he has already attained the peak of English football. He has been mocked by a pizza company.
There was a Pizza Hut advert in the 1990s in which Stuart Pearce and Chris Waddle teased Gareth Southgate for his penalty shootout miss at Euro ’96. The former pair failed from the spot at Italia ’90 so were well-placed to deliver a little light ribbing.
Times change, though, and there’s social media engagement to harvest these days. Domino’s Pizza therefore decided they could mock Núñez for his recent misses in front of goal after Liverpool’s 3-1 loss at Brentford. “Sorry if we’ve missed any orders tonight, we’ve just had this guy start.” Insert a picture of Jürgen Klopp’s front man, and the inevitably gleeful response of ‘Football Twitter’.
But when a fast-food company might be making a reasonable point, you could have a problem. The Reds’ number 27 has had nine Opta-defined clear-cut chances since the World Cup and has missed the lot. His six failures against Aston Villa and Leicester ultimately didn’t matter as Liverpool won the matches regardless. The two at the Etihad and one at Brentford proved rather more costly.
Núñez’s current streak is pushing statistical expectation to breaking point. If all nine of his recent big chances carried the average expected goal value for such opportunities of 0.387, there’s just a 1.2 per cent likelihood that none of them would find the net. While this drought can’t continue forever — he was a narrow offside away from ending it against the Bees on Monday, after all — it is only increasing the pressure upon the Uruguayan.
Per FBref, Núñez has scored 2.4 goals fewer than expected in the Premier League this season. Despite what Domino’s might think, there are four players who have worse figures: Patrick Bamford (-4.1), Danny Welbeck (-3.0), Gabriel Jesus (-2.7) and one-time supposed Liverpool transfer target Jarrod Bowen (-2.5). This quartet doesn’t have the same level of scrutiny as Núñez, for transfer fee reasons as much as anything, plus aside from the Arsenal man, the others are not at one of the league’s big six clubs.
The next player in the list of underachievers who is from one of the top teams, and joint-10th overall, is a very familiar name, and not someone you’d necessarily expect to see there. Any guesses? It’s Mohamed Salah.
The Egyptian has run at 1.9 goals below his underlying numbers so far in 2022/23. As he scored twice from chances valued at one expected goal across the opening three games of the campaign, Salah has been 2.9 goals short of par since, so worse than Núñez in other words.
Of course, a player who is the joint-seventh top scorer in the history of England’s most successful football club can afford to underperform now and again. Salah’s body of work is so much greater than Núñez’s, it’s natural that any relative struggles he is having in front of goal go relatively unnoticed by comparison. The 30-year-old is also Liverpool’s top scorer this season, and has bagged 1.7 goals more than his xG if we factor in European football (thanks to his remarkable Rangers hat-trick which came from just 0.6 expected goals).
However, Salah also underperformed in the league last season, albeit by just a 0.7 margin. He has also only converted 12 of his 36 non-penalty big chances since he returned from AFCON last year. It might put him ahead of Núñez’s success rate with golden opportunities, but it’s still below average.
Not that anyone has particularly noticed. There’s a far easier target to mock and his name is Darwin. As Salah is free to operate under far less scrutiny than his young accomplice, a few more goals from him would ease the pressure all round.
Source: www.liverpool.com
