John Aldridge has analysed Liverpool’s latest victory against West Ham in the first part of his weekly ECHO column.
He says: Darwin Nunez was spectacular for Liverpool against West Ham – I’ve always believed he was going to come good. He’s a handful. He missed an easy chance – even that, what a goal it would have been – but he’s just such a handful.
He’s a workaholic, which I was. You look at Rushy and the players that used to lead the line for the team, they have to work hard. He’ll do that selflessly and that goes a long, long way.
He scores goals, causes mayhem and he’ll only get better. He’s 24, you know? Good now but that’s really young in striker’s terms. The experience he’s going to gain with Liverpool in the Premier League – he’ll get better.
But it’s not just all about Nunez – or Mohamed Salah. It’s the same front three that starts against Tottenham for me, but what we’ve got now is a plan B and a bit of a plan C where we can throw four attackers at you – we’ve always just had a plan A. I’m excited to see it.
We have six strikers now throwing Ben Doak in, I know he’s only learning and needs to get that final delivery sorted, but Liverpool can change the front line entirely now and have different variations with so much creativity.
Gakpo coming short, Diaz direct, Jota sniffing about, Mo being Mo – we’ve got it all and that’s what has won us games the last few times. We’ve changed certain things and it’s won us the game in the second half, and pressure for your place keeps them all hungry.
You could see it against West Ham, Wolves and LASK, they can’t keep up. The way we play, the midfield we’ve got and the intensity, they can’t cope with that for 90 minutes. Unless it’s City or some other brilliant team, we wear teams down in different manners.
We didn’t have as much creativity without Trent Alexander-Arnold playing, but we still managed to get it done. They come out the blocks, tried to work us and we took advantage.
West Ham, or Michail Antonio in particular, also made the major error of giving the opposition a free team talk. You can’t be doing that.
I did think it was blown out of context a little bit but he’s left himself open there, very naïve to say that. You saw the response from Matip and van Dijk – they matched his battle and he’s a tank!
I was impressed by Matip, he seems to have regained his confidence along with Joe Gomez. They lost it big time last year but they’re getting better and better each game.
