Life without Luis Suarez: Where are Liverpool's goals going to come from?

Liverpool’s recruitment policy this summer reflects their return to the Champions League.

In anticipation to their extended season, the club have gone about adding the depth their squad will require if they are to emerge unscathed from their European journeys, while still managing to stay competitive at home.

And while the Reds have correctly addressed the urgency of bolstering their squad because of their Champions League status, what now has to take centrestage for them is replacing the man whose goals returned them to Europe’s elite.

Luis Suarez’s 31 goals won him a motley of personal honours, but more importantly, en route to staying atop the Premier League goal scoring charts from start to finish, guided Liverpool back to the Champions League, a competition they last played in in 2010.

Understandably, the question on most Liverpool supporters’ lips will be ‘where are the goals going to come from?’ because in selling Suarez to Barcelona, Liverpool have removed the fulcrum of their attack, because Suarez isn’t just a prolific goal scorer.

Last season, Suarez was nigh unplayable at times. Goals aside, Suarez created a whopping 87 scoring opportunities and was created with 12 assists. Club captain Steven Gerrard was a distant second with 67 chances created.

His talent meant he was able to occupy an opposition’s back four on his own, thereby pulling defenders out of position with his intelligent runs, allowing team mates to find space and create goal scoring opportunities of their own.

In fact, so influential was Suarez to Liverpool’s performances that he was named Europe’s most Influential Player in a study commissioned by Bloomberg, ahead of players such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

Liverpool have added several creative players to their fold this summer. Adam Lallana and Emre Can will be expected to create chances and orchestrate play alongside the rest of Liverpool’s talented midfielders, while both Lazar Markovic and the returning Suso will add pace and technical prowess on the wings.

But while these players are all talented in their own right, they need someone who ties all of their work together in the final third of the pitch. Gerrard does that for Liverpool in the heart of midfield, and Suarez provided that leadership further up the park.

Much like Gareth Bale was at Tottenham Hotspur, Suarez is the man who assumes responsibility for Liverpool in the final third. He provides whatever attacking component the team requires at that time, whether it is snaffling home a through ball or making a run so that he can draw defenders from one of his teammates who may be better positioned to score a goal than he is.

Andre Villas-Boas’ attempt to replace Gareth Bale and distribute his responsibility among a host of other players backfired in spectacular fashion and Brendan Rodgers’ attempts to replace Suarez similarly might result in a similar debacle at Anfield.

Rodgers already knows full well the manner in which his team perform in the absence of Suarez. The Uruguayan missed the first five league matches of Liverpool’s 2013-14 season as part of the ban he’d received for biting Branislav Ivanovic when the two clubs met at Anfield during the business end of the previous season.

Consequentially, Liverpool just about managed to squeak past Stoke City, Aston Villa and Manchester United, posting 1-0 wins against all three teams. Despite winning all three matches, the Reds did look bereft of ideas for large parts of these games and struggled to create chances.

While they did manage to ride their luck on occasion – at Villa Park for example, despite winning, the Reds mustered only five shots in response to Villa’s 17 – the absence of Suarez was clearly felt against Swansea and Southampton.

Suarez is the sort of player who can single-handedly turn a game on its head and they could’ve used his technical nous at the Liberty Stadium, where they drew 2-2 to a Swansea team that took their chances. The Swans created 18 goal scoring opportunities that day in response to Liverpool’s 12, and were the sort of team against whom Suarez would’ve surely made the difference.

Ditto the game against Southampton, who came away with three precious points from Anfield when Dejan Lovren – who will spend next season in Liverpool Red – deservedly gave the St. Mary’s team the win, having created more chances (12) than the hosts did (10).

In the absence of Suarez, Liverpool at times look positively mediocre and rather ordinary and that is something Rodgers will have to immediately rectify if they are to mount another Premier League title assault this season.

Having suitably bolstered his squad with talented players, Rodgers now has plenty of time to look for a marquee striker to replace Suarez. He’ll need that time, as strikers of Suarez’s calibre are hard to find and even harder to finance.

Having most likely already drawn up a (very short) list of replacements, Rodgers and his backroom staff will need to devote plenty of time and energy towards bringing in this new striker because convincing a team to part with one of their top players is going to be a very arduous task.

Fortunately, the Reds have more than recouped their initial investment on their Uruguayan talisman and having sold him for a cool £75 million, can now re-invest a major chunk of that in their new arrival.

One of the players on this list would surely be Karim Benzema. Despite all the talent he possesses, the France striker would not be as indispensable to Real Madrid as Ronaldo or Bale would be and he would surely consider moving to a club where he is given more of the spotlight than is currently afforded to him at Real Madrid, particularly after the arrival of Colombia’s World Cup sensation James Rodriguez.

The Frenchman had a successful World Cup, being the go-to player for Les Bleus during the tournament, scoring three goals, assisting two more and creating 13 chances in the five matches he played at Brazil 2014.

Didier Deschamps allowed him a free attacking role in South America and Brendan Rodgers would surely give him the same liberty at Liverpool. For Real Madrid, Benzema found the back of the net 22 times in all competitions and assisted a further 14 last season.

In addition, he created a very impressing 85 scoring chances for the Champions League holders. Only Angel di Maria (109) and Isco (96) created more, with Ronaldo (69), Bale (50) and Luka Modric (67) well behind him.

Benzema would surely love to move to England after five seasons in Spain as would represent a new challenge in his career and Liverpool certainly have the funds to make that happen.

Another player Rodgers might consider is Edinson Cavani, who knows he cannot be Paris Saint-Germain’s undisputed first-choice centre-forward as long as Zlatan Ibrahimovic is present in the French capital. Having previously voiced his discontent at being forced to play out wide, Suarez’s fellow international teammate would’ve surely heard good things about Liverpool while on international duty and might covet that centre-forward role.

The Parisians will not sell one of their prized assets on the cheap, but a deal should be doable, especially since they cannot spend any more money because of the Financial Fair Play restrictions, and Cavani’s resentment towards being second-fiddle to Ibrahimovic might curdle the atmosphere at the Parc des Princes dressing room.

The 27-year-old scored 25 goals in all competitions last season, creating a total of 27 chances. However, his unfamiliar role out wide limited his assists tally, but that will surely rectify itself if Rodgers installs him in the centre-forward position.

Suarez’s departure to Barcelona would’ve been a situation that Rodgers would’ve surely anticipated, and he will surely have a contingency plan to replace him at the earliest. The best laid plans, however, can often go awry, which makes Liverpool’s 2014-15 a very interesting one.