Forget the Failings Elsewhere, Munoz Is Building a Case to Start Every Week
Plenty went wrong for Liverpool against Nottingham Forest, but one player keeps giving supporters a reason to look forward rather than back, and it is not one of the big names brought in over the summer. Victor Munoz was named Man of the Match for the second week running, and on the evidence of these opening rounds under Andoni Iraola, that is starting to look less like a coincidence and more like a genuine pattern.
The one player who looked like he wanted the ball
There is a version of this Liverpool performance where nobody stands out at all, where the same tired, predictable buildup play gets shut down once Forest settled into their defensive shape. Munoz would not allow that to happen. Every time he received possession he looked to turn and attack space immediately, rather than recycling the ball sideways the way so many of his teammates did for long stretches. That single instinct, to run at a defender rather than away from the contest, made him the most dangerous attacking outlet Liverpool had all afternoon.
The numbers from the match back up what the eye test suggested. Munoz recorded the fastest sprint speed of anyone on the pitch, north of 32 kilometres an hour, and was fouled more than any other Liverpool player on the day, a fair indication of how much trouble he was causing a Forest back line that had otherwise coped fairly comfortably.
A versatile weapon Iraola badly needs
What makes Munoz particularly interesting is that his equaliser, driven confidently into the roof of the net, was not really the headline part of his game. It was the conviction behind it. This was not a fortunate deflection or a scramble in the box, it was a young player receiving the ball in a dangerous area and backing himself to finish it, exactly the kind of self belief Liverpool have lacked in the final third for long periods this season.
He also offers Iraola something rare, the ability to play effectively from either flank. With Bradley Barcola set to arrive and add further competition for places out wide, having a player who is equally comfortable cutting in from the right or running the left gives the head coach genuine flexibility when trying to unbalance opponents. In a squad still working out its identity following Mohamed Salah’s exit, that kind of adaptability matters more than it might have twelve months ago.
Plenty of problems still to solve elsewhere
None of this should be read as Liverpool suddenly looking like the finished article. Alisson was excellent again in goal, bailing his defence out on more than one occasion, but the full back areas remain a genuine concern. Milos Kerkez offered little going forward and Jeremie Frimpong’s pace is undermined by positioning that keeps letting sides in behind. Going the other way, Alexander Isak finally got his goal and Florian Wirtz showed flashes of quality, while Cody Gakpo produced the delivery for the second equaliser, but it was still Munoz who gave the attack its sharpest edge.
Our take
Iraola has a long list of issues to work through before this Liverpool side resembles anything like the finished product, from midfield protection to defensive organisation to further reinforcements in the transfer market. But a rebuild rarely announces itself all at once. Sometimes it starts with one player consistently doing the thing everyone else on the pitch seems too cautious to try. Munoz did that again against Forest, and on this form, leaving him out of the starting eleven is becoming harder to justify by the week.