Liverpool FC's Great Striking Partnerships, No.7

SAS

Because the remit of this series is striking pairs, it means we have to miss out one of the very best. Fernando Torres, a lone wolf whose main accomplices were Kuyt from the right side, Benayoun from the left, and to begin with Peter Crouch, but most of all Gerrard from midfield. His other partners, such as Babel, N’gog, Voronin, El Zhar, Jovanovic and briefly Robbie Keane must have left Torres feeling a heavy goalscoring weight was on his shoulders. If so, he bore it superbly, managing a remarkable 33 goals in his first season, 2007/8.

This also means we will omit the much more recent Magic Trident of Salah/Firmino/Mane for the same reason.

Suarez and Sturridge only had two seasons together, 2012/13 and the title near-miss of 2013/14 under Brendan Rodgers, when they became the first Liverpool strike partnership to hit 20 goals each in a single season since Ian St John and Roger Hunt 50 years before (see No 1 in this series here). They alsom became only the third duo since the Premier League started in 1992 to both reach that individual landmark, too, following Peter Beardsley and Andy Cole in 1993-94 and Didier Drogba and Frank Lampard from 2009-10.

Both scored some remarkable goals - Suarez’s showreel in particular would be quite something.

However there was some observation that they were not really a partnership in the sense that many of the predessors in this series, more a pair of individuals who happened to coincide quite often, though to good effect.

That was certainly the view of then-Liverpool boss Brendan Rodgers:

“They are not a pair, for me. They are individual players that play up in a system that works very well. They’re soloists. They can combine, they do look for each other but they are more individual talents who play up there. The most important thing for me is the team. As long as both of them contribute to the team, both with and without the ball, then hopefully they can both go on to become greats.”

If they were soloists, then they were both playing Flying V guitars and doing knee slides across the stage trying to play as loudly and outrageously as they could. And when it worked, boy did it work.

To mix art froms, poetry in motion indeed.

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