Transfer Window Speculation

[Flasher]

14 minutes ago, PaulMcC186 said:

Not true. Ian Graham said he was the best young forward in the world alongside Haaland and Isak but we couldn't get Haaland.

I think Nunez will go on to have a really good career either in Spain or Italy. He just doesn't fit us.

[PaulMcC186]

1 minute ago, Rusty Shackleford said:

If you cherry pick the quote, yes.

“The difficulty with Nunez was that he was a very different type of player to Firmino. My questions were: ‘Are we going to change our style or formation for him?’ Is he a good enough player that it might be worth making those changes?’. It was something we had resisted for many years.

"We went through the same data process for Nunez as with other players. I wanted to make sure that everyone knew what a big change it would be with Nunez. It was more, 'Are we sure we’re going to make the best use of him?'.

"I talk in the book about classifying players to understand what their role is. It’s different to whether they are any good or not. 

"We always had a list of ‘great players but not for Liverpool’. Defensive full-backs, target men, crossing wingers — we just didn’t play in that style. 

"It was clear that Nunez was a No 9. I wouldn’t say that the data said no to Nunez. It’s more ‘if we sign this player we have to understand this is the role we’ve seen him be effective in and is there currently a slot for him in our squad?’. 

"And if you’re spending a large amount of money on a player then he has to start. The worst thing you can do is buy a squad player and spend money that could be out there on the pitch."

He also says that playing two good games us ‘clearly had an effect” on Klopp. 

He literally said he was in the top 3 young forwards in the world.

Klopp's team created loads of chances for Nunez so they used him well while getting 82 points. He just couldn't improve with coaching. Not many players who couldn't improve with 3 years coaching from Klopp and Slot.

"Darwin looked like one of the best young strikers in Europe,” Graham told Sky. “Haaland was the obvious one, but he was out of Liverpool’s financial range. The transfer fee is not that big a component of the total spend on Haaland. So, Haaland was out of the equation.

 

“Darwin was a centre-forward who did centre-forward things. So the question was, [Roberto] Firmino’s getting older and we are going to have to replace him eventually. Would the coach be comfortable with the slight change of style that Darwin is going to bring?

 

"I can only see it from the outside now, so I don’t have any special insight into it, but the interesting thing is that with the amount of shots Darwin takes, you would expect him to be taking some from Mo [Salah], but he doesn’t seem to be taking that many shots from Mo.”