Jamie Carragher: Liverpool miss 'MADMAN' outcast

Jamie Carragher feels Liverpool are missing one 'madman' outcast they got rid of. Time to bring him home?

Liverpool just haven’t been the same this season. The Reds walked to the Premier League title last season in dominant fashion but haven’t come close to matching those levels this term.

There are several reasons for that, of course, even if some of them are completely unclear. But the squad overhaul from the summer simply hasn’t delivered a truly functional team.

That’s despite a £400m spend that was supposed to improve on a title-winning team. So what happened? How did Liverpool spend so much money on quality players and take a step backwards?

The simple answer is that they signed the ‘wrong’ types of players. Or at least, didn’t sign the players who could continue to deliver what was working.

More Darwin Nunez

Jamie Carragher has been talking about that idea to the Athletic. Was the summer rebuild actually done correctly or did they rip out the heart of the team?

“If you lose Luis Diaz and bring in Florian Wirtz, they are completely different players," said Carragher. "Diaz is a runner, he doesn’t have the ability of Wirtz.

"But you are moving the team [in a different direction]. No one could argue that Darwin Nunez is a better footballer than Hugo Ekitike, but he just ran around like a madman at times.

"So there would be energy and power."

That's certainly hard to argue with. Liverpool are not the imposing, overwhelming team that they were at their peak last season.

It's also worth noting that they fell off over the second half of the campaign - a period that Nunez was firmly out of the lineup and barely playing. The Uruguayan had a series of faults but no one can doubt that he brought something Liverpool are lacking right now.

The Reds are their best as a direct, energetic, chaotic team. They've lost a lot of that over the summer, becoming predictable fairly easy to play against.

Correcting that - and no, re-signing Nunez probably isn't the answer - feels key to getting Liverpool back on track.

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