Darwin Núñez Deserves Better Punditry

Darwin Núñez scored a good goal then had a bad miss in Liverpool's win over Aston Villa. The analysis from pundits was very predictable.

Liverpool’s 2-0 win over Aston Villa was notable in several respects. It meant the Reds have made the 12th best start to a season in Premier League history. It opened a five point gap over second place after 11 games; every team that held an advantage of at least that size at this point in the modern era won the title.

More interesting than either of those trivia nuggets was that we saw the return of classic Darwin Núñez. In his previous six appearances (totalling 331 minutes) he had taken just five shots in total. Against the Villans, the Uruguayan rattled off six in just over an hour.

The downturn in shot output is not unique to Núñez. As Mo Stewart recently investigated, whoever plays at centre forward for Arne Slot’s Liverpool has seen their goal attempts diminish.

But this is Darwin. He led Europe’s big five leagues for shots per 90 minutes last season, with 4.7, and was third with 4.5 in his debut campaign in England. No matter any improvement in his all-round game, if Núñez isn’t shooting relentlessly then the world feels even weirder than it already is.

The clash with Villa delivered a highlights package of Darwin shots. If you review them chronologically, your notes read something like: shouldn’t have shot (blocked), goal, should’ve scored (off target), what are you doing? (saved), should’ve maybe scored (header wide) and probably shouldn’t have shot (saved). The efforts ranged in value from 0.02 to 0.41 expected goals, running the gamut of chance quality.

The 25-year-old’s performance was inevitably reviewed during Match of the Day. “Darwin Núñez got his goal, didn’t he, he’s a handful,” said Gary Lineker, doing that annoying thing of making a statement rather than asking a question yet still expecting an answer. “A bit erratic, but he’s a handful.”

Alan Shearer then spoke over a compilation of clips, highlighting good and bad aspects of Núñez’s play. Lineker had a follow-up question: “What do you think is missing about his finishing?”

At this point, Shearer (260 Premier League goals and 63 England caps) gave the answer that I (no appearances for my school team) could have given and knew was coming before he’d uttered a word.

“He’s better when he doesn’t have time to think about it, and it just happens naturally. When he has that three or four seconds to think about it, I just think he becomes more and more erratic.”

This may not be entirely wrong but it’s the stock phrase when Darwin misses a one-on-one, probably if any player does. Analysis of Timo Werner is very similar. Any forward deemed to be a flop gets this treatment.

Data shows that carrying the ball before taking a shot makes it hard to score, even though Opta class a carry as just five metres. That’s nowhere near the distance Núñez covered for his worst miss against Villa.

Noni Madueke and Antoine Semenyo are joint-top in 2024/25 for carries leading to shots, with 14 each. They’ve scored twice and once from them respectively.

Mohammed Kudus has converted none of 12, Alejandro Garnacho is goalless from one shot fewer. Mohamed Salah, the forward against whom all others at Liverpool are measured, is listed as having two goals from 12 carried-powered shots. He is better than Núñez in such situations, no question. But flawless? Far from it.

In reference to Shearer’s comments, how long to think about a chance is too long? Against Villa, Salah played the key pass for Darwin’s one-on-one at 31:28, the Uruguayan first touched the ball at 31:31, then shot two seconds later. The time gaps were near identical to a counter-attack at Brentford last season, a move that concluded with Núñez casually chipping the goalkeeper to score.

By his standards, this goal at the Gtech Stadium was a long pre-amble before scoring, as he took a total of three touches of the ball including the shot. If we disregard headers and penalties, which are inevitably one-touch finishes, only two of Darwin’s other 14 goals in 2023/24 saw him need more touches than he took against the Bees in this example.

The pair were essentially the same goal, scored away from home in cup competitions against Bournemouth and Sparta Prague respectively.

For both, the Uruguay international cut in from the left before firing into the roof of the net from long range. Ignore these three efforts and Núñez only scored from one or two-touch finishes.

But so did everybody else for Liverpool, more or less. The Reds’ other players collectively scored 88 goals that were not free-kicks, headers or penalties last season.

Sixty-two of them saw the scorer take fewer than three touches including the shot, with another 12 requiring exactly three. That leaves just 14 for which the scorer may have had that indefinable length of too long to convert the chance.

Nobody scores very often after having substantial thinking time. Finishing is an instinctive art. Shearer, of all people, should realise that.

One of Darwin’s goals this term saw him take four touches. There was also longer between the assist pass and his shot than there was for his big miss last time out. Despite aeons of thinking time, it was a sumptuous strike.

It feels inevitable that Núñez will never become a clinical finisher. He was red hot in his final year with Benfica, arguably paying for it ever since.

Both he and we deserve better from the pundits analysing his game, though. They have longer to think about what they are going to say than Darwin has for his shots, for one thing.