Daniel Sturridge finally fit and ready to fire - but there's now just one big problem
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Published 06/10/2016 at 11:59 GMT
Daniel Sturridge finally boasts the fitness and availability to shine for Liverpool and England - but now it is his form which is preventing him from finally enjoying the moment, writes Alex Hess.
England's Daniel Sturridge during training
Image credit: Reuters
It’s an odd paradox, one that Liverpool fans should see as a major comfort and a minor concern: despite being the Premier League’s joint top scorers so far this season, the team’s standout striker is yet to score a league goal.
And, for once with Daniel Sturridge, it isn’t because he’s been out injured, or even missing out hugely on game time: of Liverpool’s eight matches, he’s started three, played the majority of another and joined two more from the bench. What’s more, he’s played well, running the Leicester defence ragged as the champions were decimated at Anfield and expertly spearheading the well-oiled unit that dismantled Chelsea on their own patch the following week.
When a team is playing as sparklingly as Liverpool have been of late, it matters little who’s scoring the goals and who isn’t. But that’s not to say that the last couple of months haven’t marked a sharp change in status for Sturridge.
For much of the past two years, with Liverpool’s transfer business marked by a miscellany of woefully-judged strikers and the team as a whole various shades of dysfunctional, Sturridge has been the player whose form and fitness the side’s fate has hinged on. Two seasons ago, Liverpool won fewer than half of their league games, but they won five of the seven Sturridge was fit to start. Correlation equalled causation.
Under Jurgen Klopp, though, it’s a different story: last season, Sturridge was on the winning team in just four of his 11 league starts, eight in 19 in all competitions. And Liverpool’s only loss so far this term has come with Sturridge in the line-up. Has Liverpool’s talisman become a bad luck charm?
Absolutely not – of course – and those numbers paint a largely false picture of the club’s most electrifying player. But they do hint at a slight incongruity that is some way from being reconciled, between the Klopp model of playing and the skill set of Sturridge.
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Liverpool's Daniel Sturridge arrives before a match
Image credit: Reuters
At which point the conversation tends to stray towards the selfish/selfless dichotomy: that Sturridge’s self-indulgent approach jars with the self-sacrificing requirements of his manager. It’s a line trotted out regularly, but one that’s wrong-headed on various levels (not least that there’s room in any side for a self-indulgent match-winner). Instead, the question is more one of style, instinct and physical limitation.
Sturridge has always been a striker who plays in moments, in flashes. A game can pass him by, until it doesn’t – at which point he’s generally on the scoresheet. Like many tricky forwards, he’s forever looking to latch onto the pass that isolates him against a defender, and to that end he spends much of his time loitering out of opponents’ sight, waiting for his moment to spin away towards goal.
But Klopp’s teams are designed to dissect the opposition with breakneck counterattacks rather than moments of one-on-one skill, and his blueprint hinges on the strikers harrying and pressing as though their lives depend on it.
Sturridge likes to lurk in defenders’ peripheral vision; Klopp wants his forwards in the defender’s face. Sturridge is a line-leading centre-forward; Klopp’s prefers his frontline to shapeshift as the situation demands. Sturridge’s durability and propensity to injury has always been under question; Klopp’s model requires David Blaine levels of endurance.
Again, any presumption of incompatibility would be rash. It’s too early, and far too simplistic, to conclude that the piece does not fit the jigsaw, not least because Klopp is pragmatic enough to appreciate the need for different players against different opposition (Sturridge may have sat out the last two wins against Swansea and Hull, but in the game before that he did as much as anyone to hem Chelsea against the ropes and beat them into submission in what was one of the showpiece displays of Klopp’s tenure).
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Liverpool's Daniel Sturridge comes on as a substitute to replace Adam Lallana
Image credit: Reuters
It will be interesting to see how he plays, if picked, in England’s upcoming fixtures, because while all the attention will fall on one dressing room big-dog reeling from club-level demotion, the effect of the same process on another centre-forward is rather more significant to the national team’s future. Wayne Rooney is 30 and in steep decline; Sturridge, 27 last month, should be hitting his prime. The latter should, in theory, be the former’s replacement.
But any baton-passing between those two is contingent on Sturridge flourishing at club level, and for a forward who was just getting used to main-man status having spent half a decade playing second fiddle to Didier Drogba and then Luis Suarez, the effect of losing that long-awaited eminence could prove significant. It may, however, be no bad thing.
Just as it could be galling, it could equally be liberating: watching on from the subs’ bench is a miserable business, but no less fun than having an entire fanbase interpret your every injury as catastrophic, and every missed game as a feeble phobia of the pain barrier, as was the case two years ago.
Now Sturridge has the freedom to play only when he feels his body is up to it, perhaps the troubles that have blighted him for so long will fade. The flip-side these days is that however freely he can run, he won’t be able to walk into the Liverpool team.
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