Sturridge and Suarez can carry Liverpool to Champions League

Best strike pair in Europe?

Let’s get it out of the way early: there’s plenty wrong with this current Liverpool side. The midfield, imperious though it can be, has lacked legs, durability and incision for large spells in almost every fixture. The team’s vulnerability from set-pieces will likely have cost Brendan Rogers as many sleepless nights as it has dropped points – not that he’s used them to come up with a solution. Hell, the entire tactical set-up – having suddenly taken form of a 3-5-2 once the transfer window closed – looks to be a reflex to an unplanned and needless excess of central defenders, and it hasn’t properly convinced. And yet, Liverpool sit in joint-second in the top division and could enjoy their best season in half a decade. That is to say, they have a good chance of returning to Champions League football next season. The reason: their two strikers, of course.

For all the forensic tactical analysis that top-flight football is today the subject of, the winner of a game will always be the team who has scored the most goals, and, in Daniel Sturridge and Luis Suarez, Liverpool possess two players who don’t just score goals, but they each do so with an imagination, joy and reliability that no other player in the league can currently match. Saturday’s demolition of West Brom was only the most recent example of the damage that can be inflicted by the sheer bloody-mindedness of Liverpool forward pair.

Much talk has opened up recently of what an effective partnership the two make – whether, for example, their quality surpasses that of the pairing between Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres which took the side so close to a league title four season ago. And of course, Sturridge and Suarez do make for a deadly coupling. The most intriguing aspect of this, though, is that their joint-brilliance lies more in their individual capacity for penetrative skill rather than any intuitive understanding that sets the two apart from their team-mates and opponents.

That’s not to say that Suarez and Sturridge don’t link up well together – they do, as any two players of excellence would if stationed in close quarters – but their link-up play isn’t a consistent and definitive factor in their partnership. They’re not interdependent wavelength-sharers in the manner of Yorke and Cole or Hasselbaink and Gudjohnsen – or Gerrard and Torres – but more two players of endless invention and innovation, only too happy to help each other out when needed.

Given the rarity of any sort of top-flight forward partnership these days (of the division’s other sides, arguably only Fulham and the two Manchester clubs have regularly fielded two pure strikers this term) it is easy to gaze upon this season’s defence-shredding magnificence of Suarez-Sturridge and hail them as a modern-day answer to Dalglish and Rush. At the moment, though, the duo’s menace largely lies in their capacity as individuals. When one calls to mind the players’ finest moments this terms – Sturridge’s jinking run and finish against Crystal Palace, his floated chip on Saturday, or Suarez’s nonsensically good long-range header – it’s the sheer individualism that shines through.

The numbers back this up: in the four games since Suarez’s return from suspension, the duo have plundered 10 goals. Only three of these, however, were assisted by the other striker.

That’s not to say that the two can’t link up to good effect – they plainly can, and have done this term – but their doing so isn’t their defining aspect. It’s also not to say that their capacity to do so won’t grow and flourish with each further appearance together – indeed, one expects that it will do.

But the most important point is, who cares? There’s no one-size-fits-all formula for the perfect striking partnership, and the great thing about football is that it allows for the showcasing of both collective and individual excellence. A centre-forward duo can be equally effective in the form of two perfectly attuned, inter-reliant team-mates, as it can, as is the case at Liverpool, simply taking the form of two individualists, happy enough in each other’s company, who can create and score goals that most other players wouldn’t even know were available to them.

Yorke and Cole or Sturridge and Suarez? Essentially, it’s a matter of taste. The end result, though, is largely the same: thrilling spectacle and an equally rousing accrual of points.