Jurgen Klopp believes Darwin Nunez‘s lack of starts led to his “fired up” cameo against Newcastle, but insisted the time will come for his No. 9.
Given 13 minutes off the bench at St James’ Park, Nunez turned a 1-0 defeat into a 2-1 victory, scoring twice in an emphatic display.
But for the Uruguayan, it continued a trend of feeding off scraps from the bench, with his total for minutes played over three games this season now at 41.
After an impactful pre-season, Nunez would almost certainly have hoped for more, and speaking to Sky Sports after Sunday’s win, Klopp admitted he was “obviously fired up.”
“He was obviously fired up from not playing, not starting, then put all the energy in these two shots,” he said.
“We could have scored before, we had really good chances, really good football moments – like Diogo and Mo, really good.
“It was a super mature performance and two top-class goals.”
Asked whether his supersub outing could change the narrative for Nunez, Klopp stopped short at promising him a starting spot moving forward.
The manager accepted the club-record signing was unhappy with his role, but with fixtures piling up after the international break – including entering the Europa League – Klopp stressed that his chance will come.
“Everything is OK,” Klopp explained.
“Really, I understand the question. It’s clear he’s not happy – how can a player be happy when he’s not starting?
“The thing is it’s early in the season, we need to find stability, we need to find a formation, we need to get results.
“And then we’ll play every three days anyway and everybody will play, there’s no doubt about that.
“Even if Darwin would have started the first three games, he would not have played more games afterwards because of the intensity. He can’t.
“So we need to get everybody in, we need to find a way of playing again. That’s what we try to create.
“This is a completely new team, new key players, that’s how it is. So that needs time.
“So yes, for him, definitely, a striker scores two goals and he needs I don’t know what to get the smile off his face – rightly so – but for the team it was super important that we got something like that.
“You need these kinds of things to grow together. You cannot create it, you have to force it pretty much.
“The boys did that today. Oh my god, how much I enjoyed that, the last second, the second goal!
“At half-time we said ‘if we can turn this, then it’s really something we can tell our grandkids [about]’.”
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