In the search for improvement, there are likely few strikers in world football who are able to tap into the sort of resources available to Darwin Nunez.
Day to day, at Liverpool’s AXA Training Centre in Kirkby, the Reds striker is able to lean on the experience and knowledge of a manager in Jurgen Klopp who has won it all at Anfield these past few years.
Speak to Robert Lewandowski, for example, and the Barcelona striker will wax lyrical about the adjustments he made to his game, on the instructions of Klopp, that helped make him one of the finest strikers on the continent over the last decade.
“He released that striker’s instinct in me,” the Poland international once revealed. “I didn’t know that I still had so much potential inside of me. He saw something in me that I couldn’t see.
“He taught me so much. When I arrived at Dortmund, I wanted to do everything quickly: strong pass, one touch only. Jurgen showed me to calm down – to take two touches if necessary. It was totally against my nature, but soon I was scoring more goals.
“When I had that down, he challenged me to speed it up again. One touch, bang, goal. He slowed me down to speed me up. It sounds simple, but it was genius, really.”
Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang is another who credits Klopp with helping turn him from a pacy and raw wideman to electric centre-forward at Borussia Dortmund, while the Reds manager’s work in helping players like Mohamed Salah, Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino boost their output is now the stuff of legend.
Aubameyang once said of his former Borussia Dortmund boss: “He gave me strength of character and made me develop defensively. The two years I spent with him were very useful to help me step up a level. He’s someone charismatic and I have a lot of respect for this man.”
In Nunez’s phone, the number of a certain Luis Suarez is always likely to be useful when it comes to discussing the nuances of thriving for club and country as a Liverpool striker from whom much is expected from, even more so when you have just inherited his No.9 shirt for a fiercely proud footballing nation like Uruguay.
“Luis is a reference point,” Nunez has previously said of Suarez. “An idol everywhere in the world. I’m getting started, I’m young, and he knows about all those things because he already played in the Premier League with Liverpool.”
And on the other side of the world, Nunez is also able to call upon the insight of his new national team coach Marcelo Bielsa, who is revered across the planet for an attention to detail that borders on the obsessive.
Read the full story from Paul Gorst, here.