The thing is you don't trust Nunez to do anything. You don't trust him to lead our attack, you don't trust him to counter attack and you don't trust him against a low block.
The thing is the stats don't back that up. For his two seasons at Liverpool he has been pretty much bang on a League goal every 180 minutes. So a goal every other game if he played the full 90 every week. So around 19 League goals per season despite not being a regular penalty taker for us.
At Benfica in his second season he scored a League goal every 76 minutes which is prolific.
So from the age of 21-24 he has scored a League goal every 123 minutes. So if he played 90 minutes in every game he would average out at just under 28 League goals per season from the age of 21-24.
Amazing how a player you wouldn't trust to play in an under 9's 5 a side has a record like that?
The level of mental gymnastics here is incredible. Claims of some hypothetical 19 league goals per season, based upon mashing stats together to create a hypothetical situation, coupled with essentially using a freak year when he wildly outperformed his xG as a foundation for building your entire argument upon. This whilst also cherry-picking timeframes, such as ignoring Darwin's first season at Benfica or even Almeria prior to that for that matter.
The fact is that despite hypothetical flights of fancy his actual league goals for three of the past four seasons have been 6,9 and (so far) 11. I am not arguing that he was not prolific in 21/22, but as already stated, he wildly outperformed his xG that year. That's not sustainable and given that he has actually underperformed his xG for four of the past five years, combined with his
actual goal tally and performances since then, 21/22 begins more and more to look like a freak year such as Clive Allen had back in the 86/87 season.
Personally, I'm sort of on the fence with him. I wouldn't be too bothered if we sold him, but at the same time wouldn't be up in arms if he stayed on either. I like the lad and want him to succeed and if we do see an improvement under Slot that would be great. I just don't understand this propensity to try and rationalise away all of the issues with him though.