Darwin Nunez - Thoughts?

[skend04]

This thread has improved immeasurably without the knee-jerk fanny contributions declaring how shit a player is after a total of 45 minutes on the pitch for a struggling side. Those posters are probably now regrouping for the re-emergence of Keita or could be gathering supplies ready for a January or summer signing.

[lifetime fan]

Gabriel Jesus (2nd best signing of the season): 5 goals in 1000min.
 

Darwin Nunez (Flop of the season): 5 goals in 573min. 

[Barrington Womble]

59 minutes ago, skend04 said:

This thread has improved immeasurably without the knee-jerk fanny contributions declaring how shit a player is after a total of 45 minutes on the pitch for a struggling side. Those posters are probably now regrouping for the re-emergence of Keita or could be gathering supplies ready for a January or summer signing.

To be fair keita has had 4 and a half seasons and he was shite in Germany the year before we bought him. He can do one. 

[El Rojo]

36 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

To be fair keita has had 4 and a half seasons and he was shite in Germany the year before we bought him. He can do one. 

I wonder if the buying him a year in advance messed him up mentally? Did he completely take his foot off the pedal, never to regain whatever intensity he had? He was a shadow of the player he’d been even in his last season there. It’s such an odd situation, everybody knowing for a year that you’re gone by the next summer. 

[No2]

On 14/09/2022 at 09:20, Code said:

 

Watch how fast Salah tracks back to defend. The defense rests your honour. 

[clangers]

Delighted with him, he's clearly very raw but he has a high ceiling. His pressing, positioning and tracking back has improved noticeably since the beginning of the season. I suspect it'll take a couple of seasons development but we'll have a top flight striker at the end of that who will offer something we haven't had before.

[Mook]

1 hour ago, El Rojo said:

I wonder if the buying him a year in advance messed him up mentally? Did he completely take his foot off the pedal, never to regain whatever intensity he had? He was a shadow of the player he’d been even in his last season there. It’s such an odd situation, everybody knowing for a year that you’re gone by the next summer. 

I think it's a bad idea buying a player in that fashion. I was sceptical at the time & now my opinion has been cemented. I'm kinda the same with buying a player then immediately loaning him out. 

 

Either sign a player to go straight into the squad or don't bother.

[Numero Veinticinco]

Talking about tracking back = disgusted Drake

Talking about how fast somebody tracks back = smiling Drake

 

[Guest]

1 hour ago, No2 said:

Watch how fast Salah tracks back to defend. The defense rests your honour. 

Lucky to get away with that one.

[Code]

2 hours ago, No2 said:

Watch how fast Salah tracks back to defend. The defense rests your honour. 

 

 

[TheHowieLama]

Pretty sure Nunez got directly on the end of a chance at the other end after this particular tracking.

[diamondjoe]

I support Liverpool FC not unorthodox tall target man who may or may not track, ah fuck this for a game of darts.

[Gnasher]

Officially faster than Sean Dundee and Christian Poulson put together.

[HBenn]

5 hours ago, El Rojo said:

I wonder if the buying him a year in advance messed him up mentally? Did he completely take his foot off the pedal, never to regain whatever intensity he had? He was a shadow of the player he’d been even in his last season there. It’s such an odd situation, everybody knowing for a year that you’re gone by the next summer. 

I wonder if the injury he had while at Leipzig impacted him a bit. He was all action, had an issue where he collapsed through exhaustion and has he been the same player since?

[Bjornebye]

I like the moments when he scores and it pisses a few beauts on here off. 

[HBenn]

Aside from Klopp's comments today on Darwin's need to stay fit, which is a little concerning, generally Klopps comments on Nunez fill you with optimism. 

 

I love it when a manager speaks and can explain why a player does what he does. 

 

Having watched the videos of him ahead of him joining I was concerned about his build up play but then with Jürgen's comments when he signed, the coolness he showed when he played at Anfield for Benfica and Jürgen's track record I was quite optimistic that he would turn him into a diamond. 

 

All that said, it never hurts when Jürgen explains stuff you watch and think "can you develop that?". There is a train of thought, which I admit I have been guilty of following in the past, that certain aspects of a play cannot be improved past a certain age.

 

However when Jürgen comes out and explains stuff about his technique and why it is not a concern, it reminds me how lucky we are to have someone so knowledgeable (and patient) in charge.

 

I keep coming back to Lewandowski when I look at him. A player that developed massively under Jürgen and arguably didn't have the raw materials that Darwin has to work with. 

 

I read that Darwin is also quick learner but tbh I have been surprised how much he has already improved.  I love his passion and I think we have a real player on our hands and cannot wait to see how far he goes.

[Barrington Womble]

9 hours ago, El Rojo said:

I wonder if the buying him a year in advance messed him up mentally? Did he completely take his foot off the pedal, never to regain whatever intensity he had? He was a shadow of the player he’d been even in his last season there. It’s such an odd situation, everybody knowing for a year that you’re gone by the next summer. 

Well it didn't work out with origi in a similar situation either, so it may be a point. Personally I think sometimes you just buy players and you just don't know the desire they have and they see getting to a big club as their career achievement rather than actually winning stuff when they get there. I think we saw the same with the likes of markovic and Moreno before those two. Just getting to Liverpool was enough. And it's not that they don't try, it's just at the top 1 or 2% is the difference. 

 

[Ronnie Whelan]

Really like this lad. He's got all the tools to be world class.

 

Someone mentioned Drogba and while that's a huge ceiling, I think he has it in his locker to scare the shite out of nearly every defender in the league.

[VladimirIlyich]

What Andy Carroll could have been,in his dreams.

[Alan Sex]

That’s all good, but can he do it on a dirty weekend in Skegness?

[Pete]

3 hours ago, Alan Sex said:

That’s all good, but can he do it on a dirty weekend in Skegness?

I’m sure Andy Carroll could. 

[Sugar Ape]

 

Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez: The knee injuries, the surgeries, the comebacks

 

It was an easy comment to overlook.

 

Speaking to BT Sport after Liverpool’s 3-0 win against Ajax in the Champions League on Wednesday night, Jurgen Klopp praised Darwin Nunez’s performance at both ends of the pitch and recognised the “big heart” the Uruguayan showed during the 63 minutes he was on the pitch.

 

Then came the sign-off: “Hopefully we took him off early enough.”

 

Some might have dismissed it as a little joke — Klopp finding humour in the fact that Nunez was removed after 57 minutes in their 1-0 win over West Ham United a week ago but still missed Liverpool’s game against Nottingham Forest three days later. Others might have felt a little more heat emanating from the Liverpool manager’s words, given his recent comments about the club’s injury situation overall.

 

However Klopp intended the comment, and whatever the guidance coming from Liverpool’s medical department, what lies beneath it is a 23-year-old who has already experienced the depths of despair due to serious injury. In recent weeks, it has been nothing more serious than a “tight hamstring” limiting Nunez’s minutes on the pitch, but to understand more about the approach that Liverpool are taking with their summer signing it’s worth going back six years, to a bobbly pitch in Uruguay.

 

Nunez was just 17 years old when he ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) while playing for the under-23s of Uruguayan club Penarol in late 2016. He was having an excellent season and was on the verge of a call-up to the first team, but in a game against Sud America, on a pitch that was not in the best condition, he jumped for a header and landed awkwardly, causing his knee to bend badly.

 

“There are two central ligaments in the knee: the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) and the ACL,” explains knee surgeon Andy Williams, who has worked in professional sport since 1999 and operated on approximately 4,500 ACLs (around half of which have been in professional sportspeople).

 

“The ACL is key for athletes who need to change direction, as it allows control of rotation. Imagine the ligament is like a piece of rope with multiple fibres in it. When it ruptures, all those fibres break and it’s like a rope that has become two pieces of rope.”

 

The injury is among the most feared for players, who know it means spending a lengthy period rehabilitating not only the knee but the entire musculature surrounding it. Even once they return to play, there is the worrying prospect of a re-rupture and starting the whole process all over again.

 

We’ve seen the journey played out countless times among established professionals, though rarely do we hear of it happening to young players. However, it is not actually less common among young players, says Williams, who calls it “natural selection — anybody with a weakness gets found out”.

 

“His might have just been bad luck, but of course, as they go from boy to man or girl to woman, they’re suddenly doing things they’re perhaps not quite yet physically capable of.”

 

We hear fewer stories of young players suffering partly because they are less likely to be high profile but also, when they are less established before the injury, it’s even harder for them to find their way back.

 

“For a serious young footballer, the big problem is they miss a season and never catch up with their colleagues,” says Williams. “When I operate on them, they all get back to playing just about, and everyone is happy with the surgery and with me, but they rarely get a contract.

 

“So he (Nunez) is extraordinary to have got a contract having had an ACL so young. It’s a testament to his surgery and also to his talents.”

 

 

The average return to play for a footballer who ruptures an ACL is around eight months, though it is usually longer if other structures within the knee have also been damaged. And for a younger player, Williams says research he published last year on 232 professional footballers whose ACLs he repaired shows that recovery can take longer.

 

“We found the under-25s had a couple of months longer recovery. Maybe that’s because it’s a shock to them — there’s a big psychological element to it and they are frightened, while the older players have had more injuries so are more ‘get up and go’.

 

“Or it might partly be because medical staff are worried about them because there is a much higher re-rupture rate, particularly in the under-20s. Re-rupture is a disaster. If you miss a second season at that age, that’s probably the end of your career. If you’re really senior, a club will wait for you — they’ve invested so much in you, everyone knows you’re good and proven.

 

“If you’re a young kid who’s got talent, there are so many others that they’re not going to wait.”

 

There is one potential plus-point for getting such a brutal injury so young, says performance consultant and Liverpool’s former head of physiotherapy Andy Renshaw: “It might have alerted him as a young player to how important it is for him to keep himself in good shape, listen to the support staff he has around him and focus on work in the gym work before games.

 

“It might have pushed him into thinking, ‘I need to take care of myself and think about what I’m doing, what I’m eating, my sleep…’.

 

“But it’s certainly not something you’d wish on any player, especially a young one, because he’s got another 15 or potentially 20 years of playing time ahead of him. During which, because he’s had that injury before, he’s at a greater risk of injuring it again and/or on his contralateral side.”

 

Nunez’s route back from the injury was a difficult one. When he returned to training after the best part of a year out, he was still in pain and Penarol’s youth coaches couldn’t find a solution.

 

 

In November 2017, the club’s first-team coach Leonardo Ramos called him up to the senior squad in a bid to get him back to fitness. “You could see he was an interesting player, but he wasn’t able to show all of his potential due to that knee injury,” Ramos tells The Athletic. “We spoke to him and started a process of strengthening his muscles and knee. He started to put on a bit more muscle mass, which helped his recovery.

 

“But even when he was training with the rest of the squad, his knee hurt every time he went for the ball.”

 

After months of playing through pain, often crying in training sessions according to Ramos, Nunez reached breaking point, telling Ramos he wanted to stop playing. It was then that the coach and the player’s agent decided to send him for a more detailed scan of his knee. It showed an exostosis — extra bone growth in his knee — which was the cause of his pain.

 

In December 2017, Nunez had a second operation to remove the extra bone. It meant spending another six months rehabbing before his return in June, but when he returned, few were in any doubt as to the talent of the player who had been held back by injury and pain for 18 months.

 

“From the moment they fixed it, his progress was impressive,” says Fabian Estoyanoff, who played alongside Nunez at Penarol. “He would beat his marker, beat anyone who came into his path. He was so fast and no one could stop him. He became the Darwin Nunez that everyone had been talking about before.”

 

By the time Spanish second-division side Almeria came in for him in August 2019, Nunez had made 22 appearances for Penarol, scoring in two of them.

 

A few months later, David Badia arrived as assistant coach at Almeria (alongside new manager Guti) and was quickly impressed by the young striker. “He had amazing speed and he could keep it for a long distance — for 25, 35 metres — which was amazing because it makes a difference with teams that play a high press to the centre-forward. He can find the space and with his amazing speed, he can make a big difference.”

 

It wasn’t until he had been at the club for a few weeks that Badia even knew about Nunez’s injury history. “Because we arrived in November we didn’t have time to analyse player by player — what he has and what he has. We asked if anyone was injured and they told us, ‘No’. After two or three weeks, I saw his scar and I was really surprised that he’d had this kind of surgery. I was a player and I had the same surgery and it stopped me from playing football.

 

“But he was better than the other players who hadn’t had this surgery. Usually, the players lose a little bit of speed. If he has this speed now, I cannot imagine how fast he was before the operation. So, in the end, we say, ‘OK, it’s not a problem’. Maybe if he has another operation he will be even faster!”

 

Nunez finished his one season at Almeria as their top scorer (16 goals from 30 games) and missed just two games through injury. For Badia, that consistency is thanks to Nunez’s intense focus on ensuring he misses nothing in his preparation: “He’s taking care of his body amazing. He’s crazy — like Ronaldo. All day he’s looking after his body and taking care of his nutrition — everything.”

 

It made Nunez stand out from some of his team-mates. While others would chat their way through sessions designed to strengthen their core or prevent injuries, the Uruguayan diligently got on with his work. It did not go unnoticed that while some players would do eight repetitions of an exercise instead of the required 10, Nunez never cut corners. Without fail, he would always complete the task asked of him.

 

Is that because of his injury history? “Maybe,” says Badia, “because he feels what happens when you get this kind of problem, so he understood he should be careful about his nutrition, his rest, about all these important points. Sometimes the other young players who haven’t had these kinds of surgeries or problems, they don’t realise how important their nutrition or rest is.”

 

Nunez’s performances at Almeria got him noticed and, in September 2020, he signed for Benfica for €24million (£20.3m, $24.6m). A COVID-19-interrupted first season saw him miss just three league games with injury (two of those for a hamstring concern and one classified as “unknown”), but in May 2021, the day after Benfica lost the final of the Portuguese Cup to Braga, Nunez was in hospital for another knee operation.

 

This time, the surgery (done by arthroscopy, a type of keyhole surgery) was on his right knee, not the one that had suffered the ACL tear or subsequent problems. It was an operation scheduled for the end of the season in order to overcome a problem that had been dragging on for some time, and which had already led the coach, Jorge Jesus, to reveal that Nunez was physically limited.

 

The original prognosis was that Nunez would be out for four months, but he returned after three and had a stormer of a season, scoring 26 times in 28 league games and impressing in the Champions League. Aside from missing two league games at the start of the season as he continued his recovery from surgery, he missed just one more league game in 2021-22 with a foot injury.

 

While we don’t know for certain what the operation was that Nunez had in 2021, Renshaw says it’s possible that he had part of his meniscus removed — a meniscectomy. “It would be about that time frame. If it was a lateral one on the outside of his knee, it would take more towards 14 weeks, but with a medial one he could be rushed back in three months.”

 

Renshaw, who spent eight years working at Liverpool before moving on in November 2017, says: “This young lad’s had surgeries on both his knees. He’s going to have to be managed, but it’s managed from an entire staff perspective. Obviously, there are elements of risk that we can’t mitigate, but we can do our best as a group of staff.

 

“When any player like that goes into a club it’s not just going to be about physios and strength and conditioning staff, that player will spend the majority of his time on a football pitch and the amount of time he spends on the pitch, the amount of distance he covers at certain paces, that’s all going to have to be managed very carefully. There’s got to be buy-in from the football department with that as well as the medical and sports science department.”

 

There was some concern from Liverpool fans in pre-season when Nunez was spotted wearing a strapping on his right knee, which is designed to help ease patellofemoral discomfort (this relates to the area around the patella or kneecap and femur). But thus far, there have been no signs of any knee issues.

 

 

Even better news comes from surgeon Williams, who says the five and a half years that have passed since Nunez ruptured his ACL mean there is a significantly decreased risk of re-rupture. “Most re-ruptures occur in the first year. And definitely by two years,” explains Williams. “Basically, they get on the pitch and test it. If there’s something not quite right about it, they’ll find out, unfortunately.”

 

He says that the “final result” of an ACL reconstruction is probably as long as two years from the time of surgery. “Often the player isn’t right for the first season back. But their sport is what fine-tunes them. So their final bit of physio is the playing.”

 

Nunez’s ACL nightmare is long behind him now. And the tribulations it put him through have left him in a stronger place physically and mentally to deal with whatever the Premier League (and Champions League) has to throw at him.

 

“For his past, his childhood and these kind of operations, if you are at the point he is, you are very strong,” says Badia. “This is not for someone who is soft in his mentality, ambitions or focus because in the end, if you lose a little bit, you are not at this point — it’s impossible.”

[VladimirIlyich]

20 minutes ago, Sugar Ape said:

 

Liverpool’s Darwin Nunez: The knee injuries, the surgeries, the comebacks

 

It was an easy comment to overlook.

 

Speaking to BT Sport after Liverpool’s 3-0 win against Ajax in the Champions League on Wednesday night, Jurgen Klopp praised Darwin Nunez’s performance at both ends of the pitch and recognised the “big heart” the Uruguayan showed during the 63 minutes he was on the pitch.

 

Then came the sign-off: “Hopefully we took him off early enough.”

 

Some might have dismissed it as a little joke — Klopp finding humour in the fact that Nunez was removed after 57 minutes in their 1-0 win over West Ham United a week ago but still missed Liverpool’s game against Nottingham Forest three days later. Others might have felt a little more heat emanating from the Liverpool manager’s words, given his recent comments about the club’s injury situation overall.

 

However Klopp intended the comment, and whatever the guidance coming from Liverpool’s medical department, what lies beneath it is a 23-year-old who has already experienced the depths of despair due to serious injury. In recent weeks, it has been nothing more serious than a “tight hamstring” limiting Nunez’s minutes on the pitch, but to understand more about the approach that Liverpool are taking with their summer signing it’s worth going back six years, to a bobbly pitch in Uruguay.

 

Nunez was just 17 years old when he ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) while playing for the under-23s of Uruguayan club Penarol in late 2016. He was having an excellent season and was on the verge of a call-up to the first team, but in a game against Sud America, on a pitch that was not in the best condition, he jumped for a header and landed awkwardly, causing his knee to bend badly.

 

“There are two central ligaments in the knee: the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL) and the ACL,” explains knee surgeon Andy Williams, who has worked in professional sport since 1999 and operated on approximately 4,500 ACLs (around half of which have been in professional sportspeople).

 

“The ACL is key for athletes who need to change direction, as it allows control of rotation. Imagine the ligament is like a piece of rope with multiple fibres in it. When it ruptures, all those fibres break and it’s like a rope that has become two pieces of rope.”

 

The injury is among the most feared for players, who know it means spending a lengthy period rehabilitating not only the knee but the entire musculature surrounding it. Even once they return to play, there is the worrying prospect of a re-rupture and starting the whole process all over again.

 

We’ve seen the journey played out countless times among established professionals, though rarely do we hear of it happening to young players. However, it is not actually less common among young players, says Williams, who calls it “natural selection — anybody with a weakness gets found out”.

 

“His might have just been bad luck, but of course, as they go from boy to man or girl to woman, they’re suddenly doing things they’re perhaps not quite yet physically capable of.”

 

We hear fewer stories of young players suffering partly because they are less likely to be high profile but also, when they are less established before the injury, it’s even harder for them to find their way back.

 

“For a serious young footballer, the big problem is they miss a season and never catch up with their colleagues,” says Williams. “When I operate on them, they all get back to playing just about, and everyone is happy with the surgery and with me, but they rarely get a contract.

 

“So he (Nunez) is extraordinary to have got a contract having had an ACL so young. It’s a testament to his surgery and also to his talents.”

 

 

The average return to play for a footballer who ruptures an ACL is around eight months, though it is usually longer if other structures within the knee have also been damaged. And for a younger player, Williams says research he published last year on 232 professional footballers whose ACLs he repaired shows that recovery can take longer.

 

“We found the under-25s had a couple of months longer recovery. Maybe that’s because it’s a shock to them — there’s a big psychological element to it and they are frightened, while the older players have had more injuries so are more ‘get up and go’.

 

“Or it might partly be because medical staff are worried about them because there is a much higher re-rupture rate, particularly in the under-20s. Re-rupture is a disaster. If you miss a second season at that age, that’s probably the end of your career. If you’re really senior, a club will wait for you — they’ve invested so much in you, everyone knows you’re good and proven.

 

“If you’re a young kid who’s got talent, there are so many others that they’re not going to wait.”

 

There is one potential plus-point for getting such a brutal injury so young, says performance consultant and Liverpool’s former head of physiotherapy Andy Renshaw: “It might have alerted him as a young player to how important it is for him to keep himself in good shape, listen to the support staff he has around him and focus on work in the gym work before games.

 

“It might have pushed him into thinking, ‘I need to take care of myself and think about what I’m doing, what I’m eating, my sleep…’.

 

“But it’s certainly not something you’d wish on any player, especially a young one, because he’s got another 15 or potentially 20 years of playing time ahead of him. During which, because he’s had that injury before, he’s at a greater risk of injuring it again and/or on his contralateral side.”

 

Nunez’s route back from the injury was a difficult one. When he returned to training after the best part of a year out, he was still in pain and Penarol’s youth coaches couldn’t find a solution.

 

 

In November 2017, the club’s first-team coach Leonardo Ramos called him up to the senior squad in a bid to get him back to fitness. “You could see he was an interesting player, but he wasn’t able to show all of his potential due to that knee injury,” Ramos tells The Athletic. “We spoke to him and started a process of strengthening his muscles and knee. He started to put on a bit more muscle mass, which helped his recovery.

 

“But even when he was training with the rest of the squad, his knee hurt every time he went for the ball.”

 

After months of playing through pain, often crying in training sessions according to Ramos, Nunez reached breaking point, telling Ramos he wanted to stop playing. It was then that the coach and the player’s agent decided to send him for a more detailed scan of his knee. It showed an exostosis — extra bone growth in his knee — which was the cause of his pain.

 

In December 2017, Nunez had a second operation to remove the extra bone. It meant spending another six months rehabbing before his return in June, but when he returned, few were in any doubt as to the talent of the player who had been held back by injury and pain for 18 months.

 

“From the moment they fixed it, his progress was impressive,” says Fabian Estoyanoff, who played alongside Nunez at Penarol. “He would beat his marker, beat anyone who came into his path. He was so fast and no one could stop him. He became the Darwin Nunez that everyone had been talking about before.”

 

By the time Spanish second-division side Almeria came in for him in August 2019, Nunez had made 22 appearances for Penarol, scoring in two of them.

 

A few months later, David Badia arrived as assistant coach at Almeria (alongside new manager Guti) and was quickly impressed by the young striker. “He had amazing speed and he could keep it for a long distance — for 25, 35 metres — which was amazing because it makes a difference with teams that play a high press to the centre-forward. He can find the space and with his amazing speed, he can make a big difference.”

 

It wasn’t until he had been at the club for a few weeks that Badia even knew about Nunez’s injury history. “Because we arrived in November we didn’t have time to analyse player by player — what he has and what he has. We asked if anyone was injured and they told us, ‘No’. After two or three weeks, I saw his scar and I was really surprised that he’d had this kind of surgery. I was a player and I had the same surgery and it stopped me from playing football.

 

“But he was better than the other players who hadn’t had this surgery. Usually, the players lose a little bit of speed. If he has this speed now, I cannot imagine how fast he was before the operation. So, in the end, we say, ‘OK, it’s not a problem’. Maybe if he has another operation he will be even faster!”

 

Nunez finished his one season at Almeria as their top scorer (16 goals from 30 games) and missed just two games through injury. For Badia, that consistency is thanks to Nunez’s intense focus on ensuring he misses nothing in his preparation: “He’s taking care of his body amazing. He’s crazy — like Ronaldo. All day he’s looking after his body and taking care of his nutrition — everything.”

 

It made Nunez stand out from some of his team-mates. While others would chat their way through sessions designed to strengthen their core or prevent injuries, the Uruguayan diligently got on with his work. It did not go unnoticed that while some players would do eight repetitions of an exercise instead of the required 10, Nunez never cut corners. Without fail, he would always complete the task asked of him.

 

Is that because of his injury history? “Maybe,” says Badia, “because he feels what happens when you get this kind of problem, so he understood he should be careful about his nutrition, his rest, about all these important points. Sometimes the other young players who haven’t had these kinds of surgeries or problems, they don’t realise how important their nutrition or rest is.”

 

Nunez’s performances at Almeria got him noticed and, in September 2020, he signed for Benfica for €24million (£20.3m, $24.6m). A COVID-19-interrupted first season saw him miss just three league games with injury (two of those for a hamstring concern and one classified as “unknown”), but in May 2021, the day after Benfica lost the final of the Portuguese Cup to Braga, Nunez was in hospital for another knee operation.

 

This time, the surgery (done by arthroscopy, a type of keyhole surgery) was on his right knee, not the one that had suffered the ACL tear or subsequent problems. It was an operation scheduled for the end of the season in order to overcome a problem that had been dragging on for some time, and which had already led the coach, Jorge Jesus, to reveal that Nunez was physically limited.

 

The original prognosis was that Nunez would be out for four months, but he returned after three and had a stormer of a season, scoring 26 times in 28 league games and impressing in the Champions League. Aside from missing two league games at the start of the season as he continued his recovery from surgery, he missed just one more league game in 2021-22 with a foot injury.

 

While we don’t know for certain what the operation was that Nunez had in 2021, Renshaw says it’s possible that he had part of his meniscus removed — a meniscectomy. “It would be about that time frame. If it was a lateral one on the outside of his knee, it would take more towards 14 weeks, but with a medial one he could be rushed back in three months.”

 

Renshaw, who spent eight years working at Liverpool before moving on in November 2017, says: “This young lad’s had surgeries on both his knees. He’s going to have to be managed, but it’s managed from an entire staff perspective. Obviously, there are elements of risk that we can’t mitigate, but we can do our best as a group of staff.

 

“When any player like that goes into a club it’s not just going to be about physios and strength and conditioning staff, that player will spend the majority of his time on a football pitch and the amount of time he spends on the pitch, the amount of distance he covers at certain paces, that’s all going to have to be managed very carefully. There’s got to be buy-in from the football department with that as well as the medical and sports science department.”

 

There was some concern from Liverpool fans in pre-season when Nunez was spotted wearing a strapping on his right knee, which is designed to help ease patellofemoral discomfort (this relates to the area around the patella or kneecap and femur). But thus far, there have been no signs of any knee issues.

 

 

Even better news comes from surgeon Williams, who says the five and a half years that have passed since Nunez ruptured his ACL mean there is a significantly decreased risk of re-rupture. “Most re-ruptures occur in the first year. And definitely by two years,” explains Williams. “Basically, they get on the pitch and test it. If there’s something not quite right about it, they’ll find out, unfortunately.”

 

He says that the “final result” of an ACL reconstruction is probably as long as two years from the time of surgery. “Often the player isn’t right for the first season back. But their sport is what fine-tunes them. So their final bit of physio is the playing.”

 

Nunez’s ACL nightmare is long behind him now. And the tribulations it put him through have left him in a stronger place physically and mentally to deal with whatever the Premier League (and Champions League) has to throw at him.

 

“For his past, his childhood and these kind of operations, if you are at the point he is, you are very strong,” says Badia. “This is not for someone who is soft in his mentality, ambitions or focus because in the end, if you lose a little bit, you are not at this point — it’s impossible.”

This is pretty concerning really and probably why the club built in so many targets before paying the full fee. Its ok at Abu Dhabi or Chelsea or Utd where they'll simply buy another player to fill injury lay offs but not here. 

[TD_LFC]

On 28/10/2022 at 08:35, lifetime fan said:

Gabriel Jesus (2nd best signing of the season): 5 goals in 1000min.
 

Darwin Nunez (Flop of the season): 5 goals in 573min. 

There's a bit of the old Firmino argument in that though.

 

With a quarter of the season gone it's clear that Jesus has improved Arsenal massively and is the player who makes the space for Martinelli and Saka by pulling defenders around with his movement (could still all go wrong for them).

 

I guess it's whether collective or individual success is better for a team and how a player is judged against that (The Cristiano Ronaldo paradox?)

[Aventus]

I had a dream last night that he scores a hattrick and gets sent off for nutting someone again. 

 

Bet your house on it lids, we're all getting rich tonight.