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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Sport
David Maddock

Luis Diaz is a future Kop icon who personifies Liverpool's depth and Everton's struggles

They haven't got a song for Luiz Diaz on the Kop yet, but expect one to be incoming imminently.

The Colombian, who arrived from Porto in January, isn’t just audacious - he’s outrageous. He is the sort of footballer that fans dream of joining their club... the sort of player who has songs sung about him long after he departs.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that his introduction alongside Divock Origi was the difference not only in Liverpool's tense 2-0 win against Everton on Sunday, but the sort of stark example that emphasises the gap between these two Merseyside clubs.

Make no mistake, Liverpool were struggling here. It wasn’t quite the losing of heads level of anger against snide tactics that cost them the title in the game against Chelsea in 2014, but it was getting close.

Everton’s - perfectly legitimate, and more pertinently, appropriate - tactics of disrupting and delaying, of trying to stop any form of football contest, worked almost beautifully for an hour.

But then Diaz with his shimmering quality, arrived to transform the mood, and the game. Almost his first touch was a ridiculous back heel control of a long ball, to open up a run which almost produced a goal. That he cost less than £40million shows how immaculate Liverpool’s recruitment now is. They barely make a mistake in the transfer market.

Luis Diaz's introduction secured all three points for Liverpool (Getty Images)

Will Everton stay up? Let us know in the comments below!

He and Origi, that forgotten son of so many triumphs in adversity past, broke Everton resolve, and with it their hearts. Yet they also highlighted what is missing from the Blues squad.

They have no depth. When they needed to turn to their bench for salvation at the end, they had only a Dele Alli still navigating his way back from the wilderness after two lost years, and Salomon Rondon.

Yet the painful truth is, Everton have spent far more net in the past six years than Liverpool. They have had the chance to sign the players their great rivals have, but have got their recruitment spectacularly, criminally wrong.

It is a symptom of the problems at the top, with owner Farhad Moshiri so clueless in his appointment of managers and taking advice from agents with a simple agenda of making money, taking them to the verge of relegation. The Toffees are now 18th in the Premier League, two points behind Burnley in 17th with a game in hand.

Two examples. In the summer Liverpool signed Saido Mane, they signed Gylfi Sigurdsson. The next summer, it was Mohamed Salah and Yannick Bolasie. Guess which combination cost more? Moshiri has wasted so much money, you’d think he was the UK government doling out Covid cash to their VIP mates.

And that is the harsh, painful reality of why they are now in the relegation zone... with every chance of staying there, because they don’t have a squad to compete in the Premier League, through such wanton incompetence over such a long period.

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