There are many obvious distinctions between the beginning of Luis Daz’s Liverpool career and the early weeks of Cody Gakpo’s stint at Anfield, but one has gone unnoticed.
In the last two years, Liverpool has made major moves in January, bringing in Luis Díaz last season and Cody Gakpo this term.
The pair, who are both right-footed attackers, arrived for similar price tags — Díaz could cost up to $60m (£50m/€56m) and Gakpo up to $53m (£44m/€49m) — but entered very different circumstances.
Díaz joined a team that was three games into a nine-match winning streak that would ignite an unprecedented quadruple push, while Gakpo walked into a side that was in the midst of a collapse.
The Colombian predictably thrived, assisting on his debut and scoring his first Premier League goal in just his second appearance in the competition, while the Dutchman endured an understandably tricky start.
His strike in Monday night’s Merseyside Derby victory was his first goal contribution for the club and it came in his seventh match. But it’s important that we recognize that Jürgen Klopp has taken a drastically different approach with both players.
In the case of Díaz, it was virtually plug-and-play. The manager revealed following his full debut against Leicester that he decided to ‘just let him play’ rather than overloading him ‘without five million informations’ about the team’s tactics (via This is Anfield).
Even a couple of weeks later, when the former Porto man had had more training time with his new teammates, the message was the same. Klopp explained that there was no need to ‘directly convert him into what we think he can be’, because Díaz was a ‘naturally’ a ‘very close’ fit (via LFC).
Eventually, there would be a need to ‘talk longer and in more detail’, but in the early months of his Anfield career, Liverpool was pretty much happy with the version of Díaz that arrived from Portugal.
By contrast, Gakpo has had to take on an unfamiliar role following his move.
Before he joined Liverpool, he’d played 165 club games as a left winger, but only 23 as a center-forward.
Watching him at the World Cup with the Netherlands, Liverpool fans might have got the impression he was comfortable as a striker given that he scored two goals from that position, but he’s actually only played there four times for Louis van Gaal’s side overall.
Klopp, then, has sprung a surprise by using Gakpo centrally even when specialist number nine Darwin Núñez has been available. He’s been moved away from the left flank where he was thriving at PSV, with 13 goals and 17 assists in 24 appearances prior to the tournament in Qatar.
Cody Gakpo of Liverpool (Image: Photo by Visionhaus/Getty Images)
And Gakpo hasn’t just been asked to operate as a striker, he’s been deployed as a false nine.
That means more responsibilities, with the 23-year-old telling Sky Sports after the derby, for instance, that he’s expected to play a key part in the team’s build-up play.
Klopp has, in this sense, demanded a lot more of Gakpo than he did of Díaz. Perhaps that’s because he regarded the latter as a perfect fit, while the former’s game had to be reshaped a little.
Gakpo is already playing in a new team, new country and new league but the addition of a new role on top of all that only steepens the learning curve.
This gives Liverpool and its supporters yet another reason to be patient with the club’s latest signing.
Crucially, Gakpo has shown enough moments of promise to inspire optimism, not least in the Merseyside derby, when he produced his best performance in red so far.
source: www.liverpool.com
