Darwin Nunez is paying no attention to the haters after he was roundly mocked by rival fans for his performance in Liverpool’s 2-0 friendly victory over Crystal Palace.
The Uruguayan missed a sitter in his first outing for the club against Manchester United earlier this week and once again struggled to live up to his £85million price tag in Friday’s friendly in Singapore.
Nunez was subbed on at half-time as Jurgen Klopp effectively fielded two sides, though he was withdrawn after barely half an hour following an uninspiring display.
A compilation of his cameo went viral on social media afterwards, featuring another poor miss and some wayward passing.
Against United, Nunez had blazed over the bar from 10 yards while against Palace he missed the ball completely after a pull-back from Trent Alexander-Arnold.
In defence of the former Benfica man, the cross took a slight touch off a defender before Nunez did a borderline comical air kick.
The compilation also featured a poor attempt to head the ball down to a team-mate – only finding a Palace player – as well as a lazy foul and a terrible pass which went straight out of play.
Nunez appears to be well aware of the pelters he is receiving from rival fans and took to social media to post a defiant message.
The 23-year-old uploaded a series of images from the match against Palace to his Instagram, adding a ‘sssh’ emoji as well as another of a man pointing at his ear.
Nunez also uploaded the same pictures to Twitter with the caption ‘resilience’.
Asked about the online mocking his new signing has received prior to the game, manager Jurgen Klopp said: ‘I’m not worried at all. The general judgement [on Nunez] is absolutely nil interest [to us]. It will be like this, and we all know it.
‘It’s kind of a game or a joke for some people to pick out some situations where a player’s not doing well. That’s only a game from [fans of] other clubs, which is normal.
‘Our fans probably do [the same] with signings of Manchester United. We cannot take this seriously.’
Asked about Nunez and fellow summer arrival Fabio Carvalho’s performances against Palace after the match, Klopp said: ‘They were good, really good.
‘But I don’t think it makes too much sense to talk after a football game about individual players, to be honest, because I’m not sure exactly but I think 32 players round about we used tonight and I liked all of them, what they did, to be honest.
‘It looked really like proper football, our pressing was extremely obvious, which is very important for us. It’s still really early. I know we don’t have a long time, it’s only two weeks until we face Man City so we should not waste time, but we are only a week together now, with different circumstances – not in our training ground or somewhere in Europe where we are used to the circumstances.
‘No, we are here and we try to squeeze every minute out for training. Apart from Oxlade getting injured – muscle, hamstring, we will see how bad it is – the rest was absolutely top-class.’
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