The problem of Daniel Sturridge: Jurgen Klopp's prolific forward who makes Liverpool less potent
It wasn’t the sort of substitution that might have been expected of a team drawing 1-1 at home against opponents they would bank on beating. There were 11 minutes to go when the electronic board displayed the No. 9. Off went Roberto Firmino, Liverpool’s best centre-forward this season. On came Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain.
That was against Burnley on Saturday. As it was, and indirectly, the change almost worked. Dominic Solanke, who came on for Philippe Coutinho at the same time, went on to strike the bar. Yet if Firmino’s removal was quietly remarkable, with Jurgen Klopp taking off the man who perhaps most embodies his ethos, the player who was the tormentor of Hoffenheim, the bane of Arsenal’s existence at Anfield and, even when missing a penalty, something of a scourge of Sevilla, Burnley did not face that Firmino.
They were not confronted with the inverted, influential centre-forward who sends Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah sprinting past him. They encountered a different Firmino: perhaps the Firmino Brendan Rodgers appeared unsure about. Rather than being the focal point of the attack, the Brazilian was on the left of the attacking trident. He has begun there twice this season and, with the exception of the 5-0 shellacking at Manchester City, when both scoreline and tactics were distorted by Mane’s red card, they have been his two most ineffective displays of an otherwise stellar start.
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They were against Crystal Palace and Burnley. On each occasion, Daniel Sturridge started as the striker. And in each game, Liverpool, often so dynamic and destructive, found it curiously hard to find the net. The contradiction is that a man who was a guarantee of goals makes his team less potent. Take away the City game and Liverpool have played seven matches this season. The two Sturridge started were ostensibly the easiest: at home to Palace and Burnley. They scored once apiece. In the other five, four of them against sides who finished in the top five of major European leagues last season, they scored 15 times, an average of three per game.
It is a small sample size, and Liverpool can cite the 35 efforts they had against Burnley, but telling nonetheless. Liverpool are faster and more fluent without Sturridge. They interchange positions more seamlessly. They press more naturally. They have outstanding individuals, but they excel as an ensemble. In contrast, Sturridge feels the solo artist who inhibits the rest of the band.
All of which poses a problem for Jurgen Klopp. If the Burnley and Palace matches suggest Sturridge has been earmarked for the home games against probable bottom-half finishers, the early results are not encouraging. They were the sort of fixtures Liverpool struggled to win in the second half of last season; they have struggled to win them in the last month, too.
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Yet if Liverpool’s greater workload this season necessitates squad rotation, perhaps Sturridge was also chosen in a quest for fairness, with an awareness of his status and his track record of being clinical. With the Carabao Cup tie at Leicester, he will surely make consecutive starts.
Sturridge tended to be confined to the competition, in its previous guise as the EFL Cup, last season, when he only began seven league matches. After the semi-final defeat to Southampton, Jamie Carragher stated bluntly: “When he plays and he does not score you are basically down to 10 men because he does not offer anything else.”
Few want a one-dimensional player less than Klopp, with his collectivist principles and capacity to select footballers with midfielders’ skill-sets. And for a specialist scorer, Sturridge has done little scoring: he has only found the net twice in his last 17 games, even if some were substitute appearances.
In previous years, that would have been a cause for concern. Not now: as Liverpool have become more of a Klopp team, he has become more of a distraction and more of an irrelevance.
Now the issue is his impact on others. The more time Firmino spends in the centre as false nine, harrier in chief and selfless foil to the scoring wingers, the less he is suited to the wider roles. It was a feature of last season that when either Mane or Coutinho were absent, it was doubly damaging. Liverpool lost either their most incisive or creative player, but Firmino was also diminished by being displaced to operate on the wings. It means the case for selecting Sturridge and Firmino is reducing. The case for building the team around the Brazilian, who has taken his game to fresh heights this season, is increasing.
Meanwhile, Solanke has shown signs he is better suited to being the reserve false nine. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain has bought partly due to his ability to operate as a winger, which, in turn, should mean Firmino is used there less. Sturridge has been a spectator when Liverpool have been at their most scintillating this season. It all suggests he will, and should, have a watching brief more often.
