The millions Liverpool have spent on promising young
attackers from overseas who failed to make the grade is a horror story.
El-Hadji Diouf and Bruno Cheyrou under
Gerard Houllier, who compared the latter to Zinedine Zidane; Ryan Babel and
Alberto Riera under Rafael Benitez (at least Riera had a few decent games);
Oussama Assaidi and Iago Aspas under Brendan Rodgers. Some have gone on to
success elsewhere, and the fault is partly the club’s, where demands are so
high and the spotlight so fierce; players are given little time – by managers,
the media and increasingly the fans – to learn the league and adapt to it.
Mane is a little different. The 24-year-old Senegalese has
two years of experience with Southampton, for whom he scored 21 league goals,
and he has already demonstrated a toughness in a Liverpool shirt that eluded
many of his predecessors. There have even been suggestions that Mane could fill
the chasm left by Luis Suarez’s departure. Well, let’s deal with that one
quickly: he can’t. Suarez was a dream for Liverpool, an explosion of energy,
fearlessness and goals (82) that the club could not always control and
ultimately could not contain. Liverpool developed an unhealthy reliance on the
Uruguayan, but so far this season the many goals have mainly been shared
between Roberto Firmino, Philippe Coutinho, Adam Lallana, Divock Origi and
Mane. Mane therefore doesn’t need to replicate Suarez’s goalscoring feats, even
if he could.
Instead, his speed, tricky and eye for goal are reminiscent
of another Luis: Luis Garcia. I won’t call it a ghost goal, as it went down in
the records as a real one, but
his strike against Chelsea in the 2005 Champions League semi-final,
alongside others en route to Istanbul, ensured his place in the club’s history
books. Mane’s goal against Arsenal on the opening day of this season suggests
the Senegalese may have a similar knack for rising to the bigger occasions and
he's certainly this year's signing that fans should be most excited about.
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