If Liverpool want to be great again, they have to think big. Not about young striker who might do well next to Luis Suarez or anything of the sort. Thinking big means bringing a proven striker, and no one would be a better partner to than his Uruguay partner and one of the best strikers in the world, Edinson Cavani.
The complete package? Can score with both feet, can score from long range, can score from free kicks and a fantastic aerial game. Cavani has just scored four goals for Napoli in their 4-2 win over Dnipro in the Europa League. It’s great, but the fact that it doesn’t surprise that many people says a lot about him and what he’s achieved over the last few seasons.
Arriving from Palermo in 2010, Cavani has gone on to score (so far) 79 goals in 108 matches for Napoli in all competitions. He is Napoli’s success over the last couple of seasons, but it looks like he’s hit a barrier with the team. Instead of challenging for a league title last season, Napoli fell to the usual curse of the debut season in the Champions League, which was a bit too much for the club to handle on two fronts, falling out of Champions league qualification in Italy.
This season, it was a promising start, with Cavani red hot, until the Juventus match, which has sort of derailed Napoli’s season. They are currently third in the Serie A, five points behind Juventus and four behind Inter. Few believe that they can do anything beyond third place at this point. The squad simply doesn’t have enough depth or quality to make it that far when the dust settles over the 2012-2013 season.
Liverpool? Things are much worse for Liverpool, who simply can’t find goals, except when Luis Suarez is involved, scoring 7 of their 13 league goals so far this season, as the team is stuck in the mid-table mud, currently at 12th place. Their last top 4 finish was in 2008-2009, and despite all the talk of wanting to reach that place again, it just isn’t working.
The Cavani – Suarez partnership led, along with Diego Forlan, to a World Cup semifinal and the 2011 Copa America. It’s been problematic, along with the entire team’s performance in the current South American World Cup qualifiers, but there’s little doubt that the two can play together and make on of the deadliest striking duos in the world.
Liverpool are a big club by name and aspiration, but not according to the players they have, the players they’ve attracted in recent years (overpaying for sub-par English players) and their achievements each season. Maybe the patient route, with a lot of pains and strife along the road is the right way to go. But sometimes, you have to gamble, hopefully on the right horses. Thinking big to become big again. Cavani, along with Suarez, sounds right. Feels right. Maybe it’s time to make something big and exciting happen again.