Has Takumi Minamino begun to find his place in the Liverpool squad?

In January 2020 when the Reds announced they were signing Takumi Minamino from
Red Bull Salzburg for £7.25million, many believed this move would bring them a
significant advantage in their run to winning the Premier League 2020. It looked as if
they had done it again – another bit of exceptional transfer business for an absolute
snip.

However, fast-forward to a couple of months and, fans quickly realized this was not
the case at all. The Japan star has featured just merely seven times, and his only three
stars have come in the FA Cup. Minamino is yet to score a goal or register an assist.
Could this signing be another one of the dreaded January transfer window’s flops?
Statistics show an alarmingly decreasing rate of transfers actually making an impact on
the teams and helping them boost points.

Despite the distressing concerns, Jurgen Klopp is confident Takumi Minamino has “the
perfect mindset” to excel at Liverpool.

“Taki has the perfect mindset for it. He is happy at the moment. I am sure his
ambitions are big and, he wants to play more often, but he has needed time.“

“Time was needed by everybody in this squad. Okay, Virgil (van Dijk) came in pretty
much from the first day. All the others needed time but had most of the time in pre-
season“

Klopp argued that Minamino can not be compared to the likes of players such as Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane since both of them had pre-seasons and Minamino did not.

“He came in and just had to play and that’s why it wasn’t easy.”

Fortunately for the Reds, the young Japanese international is settling into the club with ease now. Klopp claimed Minamino needed time to adjust and since months have passed due to the pandemic, he is improving greatly and will continue to do so.

Klopp went on to state the following about Minamino, “he looks really different at the moment to the first three weeks when he tried to please everybody and do everything that we say, and that’s in a language he is not 100 percent comfortable with. That’s how it is so now we had much more time, he had much more time to settle and he settled. That’s good and yeah, that helped.”

In recent news, Minamino may have been spared from international duty as well since FIFA and the AFC have confirmed that upcoming competitive fixtures in October and November will be postponed until 2021. This must come as a huge relief to Klopp as well as Minamino can focus more on Liverpool and the Premier League and will be able to truly focus and find his footing in the squad.

And after Minamino’s brief display of potential in the match against Newcastle in which he put his most promising performance, fans are hopeful the young player will surely aid to the squad’s gameplay massively. The judgment is that Minamino barely had a look-in during his first three months with Liverpool prior to the COVID-19 outbreak taking hold, but in that time as well, he was left out of a match-day squad just twice – once in the FA Cup replay with Shrewsbury in which Klopp surrendered his entire first-team squad.

However, when compared with the star left-back Andy Robertson, who was left out altogether 12 times in his own first three months at the club, the picture gets a little bit clearer and hopeful. Rare circumstances aside, there is always an adjustment period in which performances can fluctuate.

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via: Information Nigeria