Liverpool’s hopes this season hinged on a few things, but none as obvious or prominent as the need for both Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz – the club’s main signings in the previous summer – to come good. With the departure of Mohamed Salah this past summer and the club sporting an entirely new set-up that firmly places it outside of the Jurgen Klopp Era, the Reds would have to look to the Swedish striker and German wunderkind to deliver on their promise.
Which, of course, is easier said than done. Perhaps in earlier days, before the way social media amplifies minor tempests into full blown crises and then distributes that noise globally, a marquee transfer might have some time to bed-in. But now, especially given the price tags that are freely advertised on every report for new signings, that grace period feels ever shorter. And for a club like Liverpool, where the expectation and weight of history tend to be higher than elsewhere, the leash can feel interminably short.
Which is why the first 10-plus matches this season bring good news for Liverpool: both Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz look to be very much on the right track. And looking at the results over the past week of matches, one would have to feel generally, quite rosy.
Let’s start with the striker because that’s where the sharpness is probably most easily found. Isak’s currently standing on 5 goals in 6 Premier League matches, making him joint-second in the League for goals scored. With those 5 goals, he’s already surpassed his goal tally across all competitions last season, reaching this number in less than half the appearances he put in last season. Which is to say: this is much, much closer to the striker than Liverpool thought they’d be getting when they pulled out all the stops and went down to the wire in the transfer window in their efforts to bring him to Merseyside.
There’s lots to think about when it comes to the why in terms of Isak’s improvement. I’ll leave the tactical discussion for later as it also includes Wirtz, but a thing I do want to note is that the players all seem to have a better understanding of where to expect Isak to be when it comes to getting it into the box. There’s been a diversity of options – low crosses, high crosses, balls into the channel, lobs into the box. He’s seen it all. And I can’t say that I saw the same kind of fluency and confidence last season when it comes to the folks providing the final ball. In fairness to last season, though, Isak has basically finished nearly every chance he’s got this year, taking even quarter or half-chances – like that instinctive finish last week against Brentford off of the cushioned pass from Bradley Barcola – and making absolute gold out of scraps. I imagine that if your striker is finishing everything, you’ll feel much more free to take risks to get it into the box.
Which is an apt segue to wax a little bit about Florian Wirtz. If we want to play the caveat game, I can say that his best performances this week feature two Champions League appearances sandwiching a Premier League match against a Brentford side that played most of it down a man. But. For the two assists – an audacious, perfectly weighted pass into Bradley Barcola, and an absolutely inch-perfect throughball to Victor Muñoz – Wirtz showed the elite vision and skill that made his signing stand out as good enough to name the window a success, even without the eventual signing of Isak. They were the kind of passes you expect from an elite playmaker, which is precisely what Liverpool were hoping for.
Tactically, I think what’s been very fun to see is that Iraola’s system feels perfectly suited to the strengths of both Isak and Wirtz. For the latter, it was great to see him absolutely own the space in between the opposing backline and midfield, dragging players out of position and utilizing his vision to pick-out opportunities to release a teammate or do play a ball into their feet while placed at a dangerous position. Isak, meanwhile, seems to occupy better spaces in tandem with Wirtz, no longer ending up in similar spaces or feeling too crowded out. Moreover, it looks like Isak’s been finding more room to operate in the box, likely owed at least in part to the movement of Wirtz and other Liverpool attackers.
It’s by no means perfect: Isak is the kind of striker that’s heavily reliant on getting service, meaning that he isn’t the type to pull deeper into midfield to get on the ball. Instead, he can go large patches of the match without a touch, but when he does happen to meet the ball, he’s the rare breed of player where it feels like the ball is almost predestined to head towards the net. Almost like he’s a magnet repelling the ball towards goal, nearly always on frame.
Wirtz has come on leaps and bounds, not just by coming through with the proverbial “end product” over this past week, but also being able to play full matches under Iraola’s challenging system. He still needs to release the ball a touch sooner, and I’d love to see him charge into the box and dribble with as much confidence against Premier League defenses as he does against basically anyone in Europe. But where I’m standing, it looks like Germany’s Golden Child is finally starting to feel at home in Liverpool.
All of which is nothing but good news for the Reds. Uncut, unrefined, raw good news. It’s the kind of stuff that felt incredibly hard to come by last season, but is thankfully feeling like it might be making a return.
At the head of all of my personal good vibes and optimism around the club is the pronounced improvement in form of both Isak and Wirtz. They have given me the all important anchor upon which to tether my hope for this season. Here’s hoping I don’t get that read wrong, and that both players have finally turned a corner in their respective Liverpool careers.