6 duels won: Liverpool wiz gives national team boss food for thought after ‘tremendous’ display
Trent Alexander-Arnold won’t be the only Liverpool player feeling scorned by an undeserved lack of game-time at Euro 2024.
Ibrahima Konate has voiced his ‘frustration‘ at being consistently overlooked by Didier Deschamps for France, while Diogo Jota hasn’t started in any of Portugal’s four matches at the tournament so far.
The 27-year-old could hardly be doing much more to make his case to Roberto Martinez, and it’s fair to say that he played his part in dragging the 2016 winners to the quarter-finals last night.
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Liverpool’s number 20 was introduced off the bench 65 minutes into the goalless draw against Slovenia, and he ended the night having made a telling contribution.
It was his run which led to the penalty that Roberto Martinez’s side earned in extra time, only for Jan Oblak to deny Cristiano Ronaldo from the spot and reduce the 39-year-old to a blubbering mess shortly afterwards.
Mark Doyle of GOAL described it as a ‘tremendous surge’ by Jota to win the spot kick, adding that the Reds forward ‘deserves to start’ in the quarter-final against France ‘but probably won’t’. Meanwhile, 90min‘s Sean Walsh correctly observed that the 27-year-old ‘brought a directness that Portugal needed’.
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The Liverpool man’s match statistics also make for favourable reading. As per Sofascore, he won six duels after coming on, misplaced only four passes, was one of just three Portuguese players to hit the target and executed one key pass.
The 2016 winners livened up considerably after the former Wolves winger was introduced, and surely Martinez must put him in the starting line-up on Friday night, possibly by switching Rafael Leao to the right flank and dropping Bernardo Silva.
Alas, with the Manchester City player scoring the decisive penalty in the shootout, he’ll probably get a stay of execution at Jota’s expense. So too will Ronaldo, who the manager won’t have the cojones to drop despite a cringeworthy showreel of petulance in Frankfurt.
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