da stake casino： Adrian became the latest Liverpool scapegoat after their Champions League exit at the hands of Atletico Madrid.
da lvbet： The goalkeeper made a mistake that allowed Marcos Llorente to score in extra time, before conceding twice more; the champions were subsequently knocked out of the competition.
He was unsurprisingly hammered on social media as a result.
But fans should be looking at the bigger picture.
The job of the back-up goalkeeper, in theory, is an easy one. Sit on the bench for the majority of the season and perhaps play five league games if there is a suspension or an injury.
But is there a top-class back-up in the league? They are few and far between, and very rarely do they see enough action to put in consistently strong performances.
Take a look at the second-choice keepers at the rest of the top eight clubs in the Premier League: Manchester City have Claudio Bravo; Leicester City have Danny Ward; Chelsea have Willy Caballero; Tottenham Hotspur have Paulo Gazzaniga; Manchester United have Sergio Romero; Wolves have John Ruddy; Sheffield United have Michael Verrips.
Between them, they have played 26 league games but Gazzaniga is doing the heavy lifting there; he has made 18 appearances because Hugo Lloris broke his elbow. If Adrian is included, it comes to 37, due to his 11 appearances, again due to an injury sustained by Alisson Becker.
Bravo and Caballero have made four appearances each; the rest are yet to play in the league this season.
Tellingly, Bravo played in every game in the EFL Cup as City won the competition, while Caballero played in both of Chelsea’s fixtures. If we extrapolate the stats and apply them to all competitions, the appearances come to 93. Gazzaniga again leads the way, with 25, due to Lloris’ injury.
On average, it evens out to 11.6 appearances per second-choice goalkeeper.
Put simply, they are trusted in the competitions that are deemed less important. Gazzaniga wouldn’t have played in the Champions League were Lloris fit, and the same can be said of Adrian.
Mistakes, as a result, are perhaps inevitable; they simply don’t play enough football to get into a proper rhythm and allow themselves to become first-choice.
Of course, it is difficult to bring in a world-class goalkeeper as back-up, to sit on the bench, and there isn’t a club in world football who has managed to do that for an extended period.
Call yourself a Liverpool expert? How much did each of these big-money January signings cost?
Perhaps the best one-two duo in Premier League history is Petr Cech and Carlo Cudicini at Chelsea, two ‘keepers at the top of their game, but it is rare.
And it’s understandable. Why invest a sizeable fee in a player who simply isn’t going to play in the majority of the club’s games?
It makes sense until it doesn’t, as both Adrian and Gazzaniga have found out. Thrown in at the deep-end out of necessity, and suddenly it becomes difficult to keep your head above water.
in some ways, it’s an impossible job and the Spaniard, in particular, does not deserve such scorn for his mistakes, as grievous as they may have seemed.
They are, after all, part of the trade when it comes to being a second-choice goalkeeper, a problem that spans multiple Premier League clubs – not just Liverpool.
Meanwhile, Liverpool fans are thrilled with this update on a star man!