Liverpool midfielder Naby Keita has claimed that supporters are yet to see him reach his full potential in a red shirt.
In total, Keita has made 101 appearances for the club with 10 goals and five assists to his name but has struggled to nail down a regular spot in the starting XI as a result of consistent injuries leaving him sidelined.
“You’ve not seen the real Naby Keita yet,” he told the club’s official website (via Anfield Watch).
The Guinea international has been at the club since 2018 when he joined from RB Leipzig for £59m so it’s not as if the No. 8 hasn’t had time to prove himself.
With the huge set of fixtures we’re facing this month, now wouldn’t be a bad time for the 27-year-old to announce himself properly, though.
There was real excitement surrounding Keita when he first arrived at the club because he was a player that Jurgen Klopp had been chasing for some time.
We agreed on a deal to sign him in 2017 but had to wait until the summer of 2018 until he actually joined the club, but he’s done very little to justify the huge transfer fee.
Ever since arriving from the Bundesliga outfit, he’s seen game time limited with niggly injuries and has registered just three goals and one assist in 25 appearances so far this season.
He did play from the start in our Carabao Cup final victory over Chelsea in February, though, and put in a solid display.
He does have the ability, but he just hasn’t shown it often enough – in the coming weeks, we can’t have any players letting the game pass them by like Naby often does.
We’d love to see the ‘real Naby Keita’ during the run-in, that would be quite handy, wouldn’t it?
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Too right. Underwhelmed so far given his reputation and cost – even allowing for all his injuries. None of which were picked up in making a tackle!
We would be wise to cash in on him while we still can and not let him leave for free like Gini.. after 4 years he clearly is not what we hoped he would be. Decent but too many injuries and too many indifferent games.. Naby, Ox, Origi, Milner must all make way this summer to bring in some fresh young blood. All of them made their own contributions over the years but they are neither good enough, consistent enough, healthy enough or, in Millie’s case, just came to the end of an amazing journey and need to hang up the boots. Assuming Salah stays next year, we still need another striker, one more MF and either keep Neco Williams or sell him and buy another RB to give TAA competition and chance to rest occasionally.. akin to the Tsimikas-Robbo situation. Seems that we already got in Carvalho as a Coutinho type attacking MF which is great so all we need is really a strong defensive MF to take pressure off of Hendo-Fab ..