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Liverpool FC Forum / Re: Darwin Núñez (Darwin Gabriel Núñez Ribeiro)
« Last post by paddysour on Today at 12:31:42 pm »Your original post fails on the eye test. For the vast majority of the season we’ve looked much better with Núñez in the team. It fails on the stats test too. The post I’ve quoted fails to recognise how big a problem our defence has been to our hopes of getting 90+ points. Game state is a huge deal and when we were hitting high 90 points totals we were the master of it. But now we’re going behind in game after game after game. It’s just not sustainable. Nor is conceding multiple goals in tricky away fixtures and expecting to win games. In short out attack simply wasn’t the problem.
This is part of the stuff we can't measure. If Nunez and co stopped turning the ball over so much, would our defence be better? We have empirical evidence that Alisson, Trent, VVD, Gomez, Robertson can be an elite defence.
Obviously there's other issues there like the midfielders and injuries. But this is essentially what I'm saying - we need to judge the team has a whole sum. Not just individual xG. We know our defence and goalkeeper can be part of an elite defence.
There is no stat we can use to measure this. But if our forwards never ever turned the ball over, you can imagine we'd be better defensively, because the opposition would have less opportunity to break on us. So we can work backwards from that impossible scenario and have a discussion around the team issues. So back to the opportunity cost point, does Nunez gain us or lose us versus someone like Firmino? Individually Nunez wins that battle. But the team might be stronger without him. For the record I don't think we have this theoretical player on our books, so it's impossible for us to judge this with stats. We're comparing the actual, versus a theory.
I fall on the side of the theory here. I think we could be a better team without Nunez, even if the replacement is an individually worse player. I could be wrong, but it doesn't mean it's "stupid shit".
