Liverpool

Liverpool: Squires labels Nunez penalty miss as ‘lazy’

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Image for Liverpool: Squires labels Nunez penalty miss as ‘lazy’

Journalist, Theo Squires has described Darwin Nunez’s penalty against AC Milan as ‘lazy’. The Uruguayan still scored in the penalty shoot-out against AC Milan despite placing it down the middle.

Squires said on the ‘Blood Red’ YouTube channel that he’d rather the poor penalties were ‘out of the way in the friendly’ and not at Wembley, citing Konstantinos Tsimikas as an example. The full-back missed his penalty against AC Milan, but was the hero at Wembley back in May against Chelsea, where he scored the winning spot-kick.

Nunez can consider himself very lucky that the penalty found its way in, fans of the Reds will never want to see him take a penalty like that ever again.

Liverpool would beat them 4-1 in 90 minutes, but would then lose to the Italian side in a penalty shoot-out.

Squires stated (32:25), “It wasn’t pretty was it? [Nunez’s penalty] Just a very lazy penalty and it’s something that we’ve seen at the World Cup, players have just stopped hitting it. It’s why I don’t begrudge Harry Kane’s miss against France because at least he absolutely smashed it and it’s just gone over the crossbar. You hit it hard, you’ve got a chance.

“If you’re gonna take a poor penalty, get out the way in the friendly I said on the blog when Tsimikas missed his, at least he didn’t do it at Wembley.”

TIF’s view on Squires’ comments…

We believe that if players are missing from the spot in friendly encounters, but they’re are stepping up on the big occasions, then that’s all that matters.

Liverpool fans will hope that Nunez doesn’t attempt a similar penalty in the Premier League. If does, then every keeper is stopping that, no question.

The Uruguayan has had a decent start to his first Premier League season with the Reds. He’s got seven goal contributions from ten league appearances.

There’s a lot of pressure on Nunez, Liverpool paid Benfica a fee of £85 million last summer. So, there will have been big expectations on his shoulders.

Plenty of memes have been about the forward’s ability, but when you take into consideration that it’s his first season with Liverpool, his numbers are pretty good. Nunez will only get better as he adapts and gets used to the Premier League, a lot of those nay-sayers could well end up eating their words in the near future.

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