THE REAL STORY
Mohammed Kudus started at Anfield for the first time since January, and nobody made a thing of it
A player who has not started a game for this club since January walked out at Anfield on Tuesday night and started one. That is the sort of sentence football media normally builds an entire segment around. Instead it got buried under a scoreline, and I know why. A fit Kudus ruins a story a lot of people have spent a month investing in, and nobody in the business of selling Tottenham in crisis wants to be the one who mentions the cavalry arriving.
The injury was a quad problem picked up in January. Long term, the kind that takes a player out of a season and quietly takes something out of a squad at the same time. Anyone who has watched a footballer come back from months on the sidelines knows the first start is not a formality. It is the day you find out whether the work held. His did.
What De Zerbi actually said about him
The manager called him great news for us and pointed out he can also play as a number ten. Then he listed the front line he now has available to pick from and put four names in one sentence: Savio, Kudus, Solanke and Marmoush. Read that again and then go and read the previews telling you this squad has nothing to offer going forward. Those are not the words of a manager scraping a team together. Those are the words of someone who has just got an option back and is already working out where to point it.
A fit Kudus is not a nice story for the club website. He is a selection problem for the opposition, and we have not had one of those for months.
Why the ten shirt matters this week
At Anfield the ten role went to Conor Gallagher, and the verdict afterwards was that it lacked creativity. Fine. I will take that criticism and raise you the obvious follow up nobody bothered with: the manager has just told you he has another player who can fill that role, and that player has been unavailable since the winter. You cannot write that a side has no creative option in the same week the manager tells you he has just got one back. You can only do that if you decided the conclusion before you read the team news.
I am not claiming a player returning from a long layoff solves everything on Saturday. I am claiming this squad is getting stronger every week while the league table stays frozen on a number from August, and one of those two things is going to move first. It will not be the squad.