shelf life for soccer Around the players may be the smallest. Baseball would like to get there, but in the football world it still basically works that once you turn 30, they start counting down the clock on you. So on one hand, it seems Roberto Firmino has been playing for Liverpool forever. in the second, on the stat sheet, He was actually only a mainstay in the lineup for six seasons, and at the club for a total of eight, which is hardly a flash. How could it be both?
Firmino originally arrived at Liverpool with a messy club. The Brendan Rodgers era was disintegrating at alarming speed, Steven Gerrard had left, and it seemed that brief window in the spring of 2014 when they could actually win the league, and should have, had closed forever. . It was a fantasy on the horizon, if that. Like everything else at the end of Rodgers’ reign, he either didn’t know how to use Firmino or had a lot of ideas on how to use him. We also saw Bobby as a right wing-back just before Rodgers was sacked. what was really going on here?
There really isn’t room for a traditional No. 1 in today’s game. 10 Definitely not anymore Vin Diesel vehicle speed Premier League. Even the central striker is not what he used to be the central striker, who needs to run and press and open channels for others. Jurgen Klopp appeared to emerge from his strange laboratory, and said, “I’m going to let Firmino be No.1. 10 and no. 9 at the same time! And then chuckled that manic Klopp laugh that we love so much and is probably the most jarring sound everyone in the world makes.
Jurgen Klopp as Bobby exactly off-centre
Luckily for Klopp, and fortunately for us, Bobby was off-centre just like his manager and embraced the role perfectly. Liverpool fans will remember it all starting with a match at Man City, with Klopp shouting at Firmino to go ahead and lead the line, and then he scored his first liverpool goal a few minutes later. It was as if something was born.
Klopp and Liverpool’s system depended on Firmino’s inexhaustible energy, ingenuity and audacity. He could run all day triggering that furious press in the first two season’s. He was furious on the counter-attack and smiled with delight at the unfathomable chaos that Liverpool were in back then. While Klopp wanted more control with the ball as the team developed, Firmino was less comfortable leaving the front line in that pocket between the two advanced midfielders and the defensive lines. It seemed like he had this force in most matches when he had the ball, just would be ghostly ghost tackles that seemed to ricochet off the air around him before sliding into Salah or Mane or ending up himself.
And yet, doing all of that still found him enough time to be in the box to make ends meet. 81 times in fact.
And even with his laundry list of duties set by Klopp, Firmino still found time to chatter. Like this:
or this:
or this:
And when he was feeling really spicy, there were no-look goals in the open net or evil over Just because he felt like it.
A Fluffy 9 with All the Toppings
It would probably be too much to say that Firmino invented the false 9 role, as teams had used it before, and he was not just a false 9. That was a False 9 with all the toppings. He certainly made it his own, while also never hiding how successful he was at doing all these things that just weren’t going to come with one player. Perhaps no player possessed such a sound structure while simultaneously being completely avant-garde as Firmino.
Every fan has his own favorite goal among the club’s legends. Most can pick their winner against PSG after he injured his eye in training the day before and can’t really see out of it. or maybe it hammer of the Gods against Stoke. Maybe this slalom against Arsenal.
Maybe at the end of 2019 the club will be about to win the World Championship. I got something the day after that. Two The goals themselves were not special against Leicester. But Liverpool flew back from the Middle East for that Boxing Day clash, home to a team that was in second place at the time, and left to rub Leicester’s asses for 90 minutes under moonlight to the tune of a 4-0 scoreline. There were doubts that the league title was finally coming back to Anfield. As we saw, it was a complete disintegration of a team, and leading the line for it was Bobby and he Vegas-GW Smile with which he used to play.
Bobby had a lot in the game for them to be together forever. You can’t run as much as he did and do all the other things in your 30s. The arrival of Luis Diaz last season pushed Bobby to the margins, only to be worsened by the arrivals of Darwin Nuñez and Cody Gakpo this season. Soccer doesn’t wait and sentimentality doesn’t do very well either.
Bobby played his last game for Liverpool last Saturday at Anfield and of course scored. His career as Red will end on Sunday. A career full of mischief and energy and karate kick celebrations and well timed tackles and passes that no one should ever try or even see and just a pleasure that probably won’t be repeated .
Man, how could it really only last six seasons? Like Firmino on the field, there was just so much packed into him that it didn’t feel like it could only be six seasons, like it couldn’t be all in one player.
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