It's Joe Gomez Season
lets party
Touch your left kneecap, now slide your fingers down towards your shin. Imagine the little valley of tissue connecting the bones violently, completely severed. That happened to Joe Gomez in November 2020, when the freshly minted winner of the Premier and Champions leagues, 23 years old, tore his left patella training during England training.
A patella tendon tear is unique hell. “[It took me a couple of years to get my pace back” and “much longer than that for me to get over it completely,” Martin Keown wrote for the BBC last season – and Keown “only” suffered a partial tear while on England duty in 1992, not the complete separation that limited Gomez to only 15 league appearances over the next two years.
If he starts today at Forest, with Liverpool top of the table and a three-month title race looming, Gomez will log the most appearances and the most minutes since that early peak three years ago. The Kop wags and other lesser louts who bellow at Gomez to knock in the first goal of his senior career – a gag good enough for an Adidas spot, now annoying Jurgen Klopp – distract from a far more important point: Liverpool Football Club’s rebound to Premier League dominance has everything to do with Joe Gomez quietly enjoying a profound renaissance of his own.
Gomez has been deployed now in four positions this season: as a center-half twice, as both a left and right-back 17 times and as he was on Wednesday against Southampton, as a defensive midfielder. That versatility prompted comparisons to James Milner after the Reds’ youth gang romped through Wembley and then the Saints. But the thing is, Joe Gomez is also having an elite season.
As FootyStats notes, through these 22 games, Gomez conceded ten goals, or 0.71 goals per 90 minutes. That’s 98th percentile among Premier League defenders. Only seven players have a better statline. That’s pretty good for a guy who was your fourth-choice center-half in August. As for left and right backs, Gomez is keeping pace with Diogo Dalot, with Kyle Walker, with Kieran Trippier, and with his own teammates in key metrics: ground duels won, tackles, and aerial duels.
Joe Gomez has his mojo back. After Gomez’s turn at the 6 on Wednesday, I reread what Arsenal defender Martin Keown wrote for the BBC shortly after Liverpool beat City 1-0 at Anfield last year. Just shy of two years after his career had nearly snapped, Gomez held Erling Haaland off the scoresheet for the first time in the Premier League that season.
Gomez needed that. Just a few weeks before, Gomez was raked over the coals for his role in the 4-1 thrashing at Napoli. It would get worse — Gomez was subbed off in the 5-2 catastrophe with Madrid, but in fairness almost everybody looked like shit in that debacle.
What the stats don’t show is how hard it is to quantify what it means to have someone like Gomez to plug in all across the back four and now at No. 6, but look at the year the club is having with him logging so many minutes, with injuries to Joel Matip and to Trent Alexander-Arnold and to Andrew Robertson, and you have some idea.
As Liverpool.com recently pointed out, Gomez is the only first-squad player to have played throughout Klopp’s entire blessed tenure, and, barring some unforeseen twist, he will be the only Red to have played for Brendan Rodgers, Klopp, and Klopp’s successor.
One of the beautiful surprises of Klopp’s swan song is how, with three months to go, there are any number of candidates for Liverpool’s player of the season. It seems improbable that it will be Joe Gomez, but if Liverpool do have a multiple trophy parade this season, it seems improbable to happen without Gomez’s return to form.
