James Pearce has called for Jurgen Klopp to ‘put more faith’ in Wataru Endo, who’s been a largely peripheral presence at Liverpool since his move from Stuttgart in August.
The 30-year-old’s only Premier League start so far came in his second match for the club late that month, with a mere 22 minutes played in the top flight since then (WhoScored).
The journalist and his colleagues at The Athletic were reflecting on the Reds’ season so far when they were asked to name the biggest problem for the manager to solve.
Pearce was one of three who cited the defensive midfield berth, saying: “I wrote about it after the Brighton game because playing Alexis Mac Allister there isn’t working. He’s not a specialist holding midfielder and it shows.
“I’d like to see Klopp put more faith in Wataru Endo, who has only started one league game so far. Getting Thiago and Stefan Bajcetic fit would also give him more options there. Mac Allister needs to be playing in one of the more advanced midfield roles.”
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There’s logic to what Pearce is saying. With Fabinho and Jordan Henderson both still at Liverpool when Mac Allister was signed in June, the Argentine surely wasn’t brought to Anfield to be the team’s midfield anchor.
The sales of the former two to the Saudi Pro League clearly shifted the landscape, but if the Reds didn’t urgently need a bespoke number 6 option to come in, would they have signed Endo and Ryan Gravenberch in the final two weeks of the transfer window?
The £50,000-per-week destroyer (Capology) mightn’t have captured the fans’ imagination in the same way as fellow newcomer Dominik Szoboszlai, for instance, but as a natural defensive midfielder, he must be a more suitable option for that role than the former Brighton star.
He was also dubbed a ‘midfield genius’ by Yahoo Japan following a resounding 4-1 triumph over Germany last month, so it’s not as if he won his place in the LFC squad in a raffle.
Even if Endo is likely to be a squad player for much of the season, and probably wasn’t on Liverpool’s priority list at the start of the summer, it’s only by giving him a fair crack in the line-up that Klopp will be able to determine how well-suited he is to the team.
The manager has stuck with largely the same starting XI since the outset of the campaign depending on who’s available, so he’s not likely to deviate too greatly from that, but Pearce might have a point in calling for the 30-year-old to be given more of a chance to prove his worth at Anfield.