Darwin Nunez has had a topsy-turvy start to his Liverpool career. The Uruguayan has started pre-season training with the Reds but has endured a few problems along the way.
Those ‘issues’ involve sustaining a slight ankle injury in training and a horrendous open goal miss in the loss to Manchester United, something which has attracted widespread mockery from rival supporters. In spite of that, his manager Jurgen Klopp has not lost even a bit of trust in him.
Klopp is still getting to know Nunez and what he is all about. In fact, the German gaffer doesn’t even know how to directly communicate with his new striker either. Darwin is not fluent in English and is still trying to understand the language as he adapts to life with the Premier League side. He is only fluent in Spanish and Portuguese.
Klopp doesn’t know how to speak Spanish or Portuguese fluently so he can’t directly communicate with the 23-year-old yet. He’s having to do it with the help of a translator, which happens to be his assistant manager Pep Lijnders!
The Dutch assistant gaffer is fluent in those languages because he worked at FC Porto for 8 years and learn it there. Pep is able to perfect communicate with Darwin as well as help him feel at home at Liverpool.
Klopp, although, is having to seek his assistant manager every time he needs to give some advice to Nunez or have a personal chat with him. This was even spotted in a recent training session when Jurgen called Lijnders to get a message across to Nunez.
In fact, the German gaffer isn’t the only one not being able to directly communicate with Darwin at Liverpool. A lot of his teammates can’t either! Only the likes of Fabinho, Alisson, Roberto Firmino, Diogo Jota, Adrian etc can do so because of their fluency in the language Nunez speaks.
Andrew Robertson, for one, can’t verbally communicate with the man he’ll be tasked to feed with pinpoint crosses in matches. Robertson even joked about it at a recent press conference, saying: “I don’t think me and him have had many conversations yet, we’ve just kind of smiled at each other.”
Klopp loved that bit and just laughed uncontrollably for some time upon hearing that answer. Nunez will, of course, eventually learn English once he’s better adapted to his newer environment.
But, for the time being, the Liverpool gaffer will need the help of his Ljinders or some of his Spanish-speaking players to give his instructions to his newest signing.