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Diogo Jota has had a spectacular start to his Anfield career since transferring from Wolves in the summer for £ 41 million, with many fans wondering why the Portuguese forward failed to perform at such a level at his previous club.
Jota’s league-wide reputation at Molineux was good, but little more after the 23-year-old has scored an average of 11 combined goals and assists per season since achieving Championship promotion in 2017/18.
In just 482 minutes of Premier League football for Liverpool, Jota has already scored five goals averaging roughly every 96.4 minutes, but it is unreasonable to suggest that the problem beforehand was the player.
While it is normal for younger players to experience a degree of inconsistency from time to time, it is more likely that Jota’s ceiling in Wolves was limited by the players around him and, above all, by the style of play of the team.
Liverpool identified Jota’s key strengths despite his surroundings before considering his game applicable to the brand of soccer that Jurgen Klopp represents in Merseyside, with a fast, direct, penetrating, versatile, two-foot, aggressive attacker without him. ball.
Several of those qualities were hidden by Nuno Espirito Santo due to how he thinks his own team should perform to score points.
Last season, the Wolves ranked in the middle of the table in possession with an average participation of 48.3%, while they also ranked ninth in shooting. On the defensive side of the game, Nuno’s team was second from the bottom on pressures in the attacking third of the field, and the Lobos demonstrated a preference for retreating and absorbing the pressure before counterattacking rather than pressing up high. off the field like the Reds do.
Liverpool, by contrast, was second in possession, third in shooting and up in pressure in the offensive third, meaning that Klopp’s offensive players in particular were given a more suitable platform to show their skills on the business side of the game. Park.
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54% of Jota’s touches for the Reds have come in the last third of this season and 14% have originated in the penalty area. At Wolves last season, 50% of his touches came in the final third and 12.4% in the penalty area.
Now he’s seeing the ball more and, more importantly, those touches are closer to the goal than before. Additionally, Jota now plays alongside players like Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson rather than players with less offensive quality in Molineux.
Ahead of the two coaches’ meeting this weekend, Jota could fill one of Klopp’s main attacking roles as part of the reigning English champions and Nuno will be tired of his reformed threat. If the Portuguese ends up being the man who decides the outcome, perhaps the Wolves boss will look back at his former player before silently questioning his own methods.
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