Journalist heaps praise on ‘phenomenal’ Liverpool star after Arsenal draw

Key Highlights

• I really need someone to explain why people think that he is rubbish because he is a brilliant player.”The idea that Kerkez is ‘rubbish’ has been repeated enough that it now travels independently of performance.
• Against Arsenal, he was anything but.
• He faced Bukayo Saka, one of the league’s most dynamic attackers, and though the winger “skins him early on in the game and people run with that,” the full 90 told a very different story. AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementLynch continued: “If anyone actually watched the game you would see that Kerkez won his tackles and won his duels.”Saka’s early success became a social media artefact, stripped of the context that followed.
• The problem wasn’t Kerkez getting beaten once, it was people not noticing that he recalibrated immediately and spent the rest of the match winning. Lynch added another crucial detail: “Saka ends up getting took off early because he was locked down by Kerkez.”Indeed, Saka’s withdrawal was a tacit concession that the battle had flipped.
• Far from being a weak link, Kerkez became the reason Arsenal’s right flank stopped functioning.