Naby Keita looks the real deal as Liverpool saunter to victory over West Ham and get rewarded for their patience
If you were looking to pick holes in Liverpool’s opening-day performance against West Ham United, you could at least say that their £66m summer signing was pretty much anonymous all game.
When it’s your goalkeeper, though, you don’t tend to care.
Indeed, there are only really positives for Jurgen Klopp to draw from this performance and the three points sets them on their way to, they hope, a first title challenge since 2014 and, possibly, becoming the only team ready to take on a footballing juggernaut in Manchester City.
Klopp’s side have been picked out by the football cognoscenti as the most likely challengers to Pep Guardiola’s historically-great City side but at this stage it may more realistic to expect that, even if Liverpool are the second-best team in the nation, second place may be much closer to third than first.
For now though, until that first bump in the road and until Guardiola’s side begin to pull away, Liverpool have to believe. And there was plenty on show at Anfield which gave them reason to.
Chief among the positives to take from what, in the end, was a fairly regulation win over West Ham was the performance of new signing Naby Keita.
It is now nearly a year since Keita, RB Leipzig and Liverpool first found an agreement over his transfer and that 12 months saw the Reds kick on in a way that they had perhaps not expected. A Champions League final was a welcome boost but this year is when the expectation of Liverpool really competing for silverware has kicked in.
When asked about Keita last summer, one senior recruitment official at a Premier League club said that they felt the Guinean midfielder might already be one of the best five players on the planet. “Keita can do everything,” he said.
Early signs are ominous.
Tackling, passing, running, shooting. Keita burst onto the Premier League scene with an all-action performance where he didn’t just look impressive, he looked completely at home in Klopp’s system. There is a reason, after all, that the German coach was willing to wait out a whole season for this prototype of a modern midfielder to arrive and his early touches showed precisely way, culminating in a delightful through ball for the opening goal.
Keita is not only a defensive force, having begun his career in France and Austria as a tough-tackling midfielder, but a player who progresses the ball up the field with ease. He is a smooth dribbler and carries the ball between the lines but is equally capable of picking a decisive pass.
Rather than judging Liverpool's number 8 after a game against West Ham where the visitors got pretty much everything wrong, the greater test of his abilities will be in the Champions League and in games against top-four contenders. But this was a good way to start, a comfortable and impressive performance from Keita and Liverpool which started them off as they mean to go on.
