Erling Haaland set another new Premier League record on Wednesday night, but he wasn’t entirely happy with his display, offering a lesson to Liverpool’s Darwin Núñez.
Liverpool returned to Premier League action with a 3-1 victory over Aston Villa on Boxing Day but, frustratingly for the Reds, all of their rivals, except Tottenham, won too.
Manchester City was the last of the ‘big six’ to resume their league campaign, and they did so with a 3-1 win over Leeds United on Wednesday night.
Erling Haaland scored twice for Pep Guardiola’s side, reaching the 20-goal mark quicker than any player in Premier League history, but after the match, he was still in something of a rueful mood.
Haaland told Amazon Prime Video Sport that he could have scored five against the Whites, having fluffed three one-on-one opportunities throughout the game.
Within all of this, there was something of a lesson for Darwin Núñez, his counterpart at Liverpool.
Núñez could have had a hat-trick at the very least against Villa, squandering four ‘big chances’ (defined by Opta as a situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score, usually in a one-on-one scenario or from very close range when the ball has a clear path to goal and there is low to moderate pressure on the shooter).
This has been the story for the Uruguayan since club football resumed, with two ‘big chances’ going begging in the Carabao Cup defeat against City too.
Núñez could have had a hat-trick at the very least against Villa, squandering four ‘big chances’ (defined by Opta as a situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score, usually in a one-on-one scenario or from very close range when the ball has a clear path to goal and there is low to moderate pressure on the shooter).
This has been the story for the Uruguayan since club football resumed, with two ‘big chances’ going begging in the Carabao Cup defeat against City too.
You could argue it’s been the story of his season so far. Núñez has missed 12 big chances up to this point, the joint-highest figure in the Premier League alongside Brentford’s Ivan Toney.
That might seem worrying, but there is some cause for encouragement. Núñez doesn’t need to transform his finishing to hit elite goalscoring numbers at Liverpool. Instead, he only needs to be average in this department.
It seems a remarkably bold statement, given that he just equaled Kenny Dalglish on the club’s all-time list with his 172nd goal, but Mohamed Salah isn’t the most ruthless finisher.
He too is up there when it comes to big chances missed, having spurned 11 already this season to rank inside the league’s top three.
And it’s not like this is just an off-year for the Egyptians. Data gathered by VisualGame shows that, of all the Premier League players to record at least 50 big chances since the start of 2010/11, Salah is below average for conversion. He’s finished 40.8 percent of the opportunities when the mean is 41.25 percent.
Ideally, Núñez could reach the heights of compatriot Luis Suárez (46.7 percent) or the iconic Sadio Mané (44.8 percent), but he doesn’t necessarily have to.
Look at it this way — had he buried 40 percent of those 12 missed chances, he’d be on either nine or 10 goals after 11 appearances. Hitting double figures would have had him joint-fourth in the Premier League leaderboard.
In his 34-goal campaign for Benfica last season, Núñez was a devastating finisher. As per our football scouting writer Josh Williams, he posted the highest conversion rate of any player with at least 55 non-penalty shots in Europe’s top-six leagues in 2021/22.
But he doesn’t even need to reach those heights again. He just needs to be middling.
That’s because his movement, and the creative forces that surround him in the Liverpool team, will ensure that he gets plenty of chances. Even if he only takes four out of every 10, he will reach the kind of numbers we expected. The bar is fairly low.
Haaland missed more opportunities than he scored against Leeds, but rather than focusing on that, we find ourselves marvelling once again at his record.
And if Núñez had taken even a third of his big chances over the past couple of games, the narrative would have been very different.
The 23-year-old is a far better finisher than he has shown up to this point, and so Liverpool should remain optimistic even amid the difficult early moments.
