Soccer

Núñez and Haaland are the headline acts in Anfield’s cauldron of chaos

Both strikers are enjoying fine seasons, but don’t expect every chance to be taken when Manchester City visit Liverpool

The last time Liverpool lost with Darwin Núñez in the starting XI was against Real Madrid in March last year. Photograph: Alexander Hassenstein/Getty Images

Barney Ronay
Fri Mar 8 2024 - 22:08

There will be smoke, noise and a sense of authentic event glamour. People will shout at a bus. The TV graphics will whoosh and sparkle. In due course a skinny-legged man will perform high-speed tactical mime on the touchline, revolving both hands and yanking at invisible levers, as though reversing an imaginary submarine.

There will surely be goals too. Liverpool and Manchester City have mustered 50 between them in their past 14 games before their bravura meeting at Anfield on Sunday afternoon. But this also feels like a game that might just be marked by misses too, by shanks, muffs, scuffs, crossbar-wobbling hoicks. Chances will be taken. And in between, chances — big chances — will also be missed.

There is always a temptation to soft-pedal the hype before a fixture as obviously mouthwatering as this meeting of the Premier League’s top two. We know the iconography of these occasions, the talk of duels, head-to-heads, title moments to be seized.

The reality is often different. Experience suggests there are no one-shot title deciders, not with 10 games to be played, with Arsenal heavily in the mix, and a fixture list that suggests the three-way title race may yet be decided by how well you can do against Spurs.

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And yet this does still feel like a genuine tiebreaker, given the recent history of final-day chases. It also feels like an unusually open prospect, two teams whose attacking blueprint has been configured around hugely watchable, entirely contrasting, but in some ways oddly aligned central strikers.

Erling Haaland and Darwin Núñez have been a fun comparison ever since they arrived in England a few days apart for similar fees, unusually athletic and agile 6ft-plus centre forwards. They have turned out to be fascinating for other reasons too, key players whose strengths are, as a matter of form and style, inescapably related to their moments of weakness.

On one side, Haaland, the pure goalscoring phenomenon, razor edge in a treble-winning team, who also seems, in isolated moments, to be playing with a set of trowels strapped to his feet. On the other the Premier League’s lord of misrule, a footballer who doesn’t so much contribute to a game of football as crash into it, cartwheeling about at the centre of Jürgen Klopp’s attack to increasingly convincing effect.

Both are having excellent seasons. Haaland as a point of tactical evolution for the great midfield fetishist Pep Guardiola; Núñez as a slight return, a shift closer to the concussive, creative gegenpressing of early Klopp.

Along the way the high-profile miss, the uber-shank has been a prominent feature of both teams’ seasons. There is nothing novel in Liverpool and City being at the summit of the Premier League’s Big Chances Missed table (Liverpool top on 52; City two behind). This is in part a numbers game. The best teams make more chances. As such they score more and also miss more. Missing a chance is simply what good players do, in between wrecking your hopes and dreams with their shark-like refusal to be cowed or understand this as an act of human weakness.

But there are two interesting sub-points here. First, the clear starring role of both centre forwards in those big missed chances. Haaland is top of the individual table with 26. Núñez is second, also on about 50 per cent of his team’s total, with both well on course to beat last season’s tallies.

Again it isn’t hard to see why. City’s entire game is based now on finding ways to create openings for their designated finisher. This is a team that has constant possession in the attacking third. Haaland missing some of the chances they make will naturally become a feature of the day, not least when the cinematic miss provides an obvious note of variation in an otherwise clean and repetitively dominant game. As was the case with last week’s alpha miss at the Etihad, Haaland appearing out of the skies like a stricken airship to ankle-clump the ball not just a little but absolutely miles over the bar.

A notable part of Haaland’s distinct style of miss — the power-miss, all tangled feet and pirouetting violence — is the way these moments are related to his super-strengths. Haaland’s outstanding attribute is that unmatched combination of size, speed and precision. Usain Bolt was unique in that he possessed the stride length of a big man and the snap and speed of a normal-sized sprinter. Haaland has the same combination of outsize qualities and human-scale application. Close-quarter electricity, matched with the ability to turn and run from 30 yards, is the point from which he is basically unstoppable: this is irresistible over time.

It is also why he will miss chances in that way, because the way City play asks him more often to use the more intricate tools, those quick-passing chances close to goal. And because when that part of his game is off he will miss with élan, will remind us that this is a large man required to work in small spaces. So rather than shaved posts we get spectacular whumps into the ground, or get headers over the bar where he seems to be trying to cram his body into the back seat of a three-door saloon.

Haaland doesn’t worry about misses, is never cowed from applying the same energy to every involvement because he knows he will eventually succeed that way. Of some concern for City will be those periods when he fades entirely from the game, as has sometimes been the case against better teams with better one-on-one defenders. With Haaland as their focus City are deadlier and more fragile, more vulnerable to the counterattack. He may not be a player of great range or deeper gears, but his presence still defines this team from back to front.

The last few months have seen Núñez exert a similar degree of influence for Liverpool, albeit to a very different template. Even his misses are different. Núñez’s speciality in the snatch or the skew, the miss where he seems entirely in control of his body, but still able to shoot weirdly wide, to smash the post with pointless power and precision.

Again those misses are the other side of his key strength, which is to create constant, hyper-mobile disorder. Núñez isn’t equipped to match Haaland’s goal returns. But he does have 21 tackles and interceptions this season, 592 touches, 36 take-ons, 2,149 meters of ball carrying, figures significantly high in his position.

These numbers reflect the reality of a creative presence the ancient Greeks would have characterised as “frenzy”, a revolving series of collisions, angles, shots runs, decoy runs. Núñez is always moving, always in contact with the nearest hostile body, rarely lurking in space waiting for his sniper’s shot. And as with Haaland, those misses are a natural component of the qualities he brings. For all the lean spells, the last time Liverpool lost with Núñez in the starting XI was against Real Madrid in March last year.

Both managers, Guardiola to a greater degree, have always craved control, have won leagues by keeping the ball and reducing the variables in a game. Neither feels quite like that right now, before a game that will be decided as ever by moments taken and moments missed.

— Guardian

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