OPINION Liverpool ace can beat Cristiano Ronaldo record and Pep Lijnders knows his importance

OPINION Liverpool ace can beat Cristiano Ronaldo record and Pep Lijnders knows his importance

Liverpool is benefiting from having multiple players who offer a major goal threat this season with Jürgen Klopp having goalscoring weapons in almost all areas.

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ByMatt AddisonLiverpool.com Editor
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Liverpool forward Diogo Jota celebrated against Nottingham Forest by holding aloft Luis Díaz’s shirt. (Image: Photo by Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)

Liverpool has so many attacking options these days that it is hard to really know who would be the first-choice picks. At the start of the season, most people would not have had down Luis Díaz, Darwin Núñez and Mohamed Salah as the main trio, but that appears to be what Jürgen Klopp has favored for now — but there is also Diogo Jota and Cody Gakpo to bring in too where the opponent dictates that a different combination would be better.

So far this season, Liverpool’s top scorer, already in double figures, is Salah (with 10). Then come Núñez and Jota (six), and Gakpo and Díaz (both three). There is now notably more of a threat from further back as well, with both Ryan Gravenberch and Dominik Szoboszlai having scored two each since arriving from Germany.

There are goalscoring weapons in all places across the Liverpool team and Curtis Jones, Harvey Elliott and Trent Alexander-Arnold are just three of those who can contribute as well, but have not broken their duck as yet. Before long, each of those players should be able to find the back of the net.

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Over the weekend, one man, Diogo Jota, scored his 50th Premier League goal (34 of those coming while wearing a Liverpool shirt), meaning he and Cristiano Ronaldo are the only Portuguese players to have reached the half-century. Ronaldo left Manchester United with 103 goals, giving Jota a figure to chase down.

“Same as Darwin [Núñez], he’s the one who creates by himself five or six chances a game,” Pep Lijnders said in his pre-match press conference ahead of Bournemouth in the Carabao Cup. “What I like about him is that he often scores the first goal of the game, which is the hardest one to score.”

So often, Jota’s goals are decisive ones. Liverpool missed that quality last season when the 26-year-old was injured, too frequently falling a goal behind and then being unable to recover. Now, even when it is not playing at its peak, Liverpool can go a goal up from nowhere, completely changing the outlook of the contest.

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Indeed, 17 of Jota’s 47 goals in all competitions for Liverpool have been winners (more than a third) and several more have been game-clinchers. Those include his strikes against Leicester City and Union SG earlier this season, which put the result beyond the opposition in each case.

Very rarely does Jota score a goal that is unimportant. As Lijnders says, the most difficult goals to score are the ones that make the most impact, where there is the most pressure riding on the outcome of the shot.

Remarkably, it remains the case that Liverpool has never lost when Jota has scored, and given the variety of goals that he can score and his penchant for being in the right place at the right time, it should be no surprise that he is so often the man to break the deadlock. In his Premier League career, Jota has scored 24 times with his right, 18 with his left and eight with his head, spread nicely across all three. Most players have a preferred foot but Jota is competent wherever the ball lands.

For Liverpool specifically in the league only, those numbers are 16, 10 and eight respectively (he never scored a header for Wolves but has made that a trademark at Anfield), again showing a remarkable spread. If he stays in the Premier League for another five seasons (the same number he has played to date), Ronaldo’s record as Portugal’s leading marksman in the competition could easily come under threat.

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