“I didn’t expect…” – Nuno admits one Liverpool player caught him by surprise in Tuesday thriller

Nuno Espirito Santo claimed that one Liverpool player did something he ‘didn’t expect’ against his Nottingham Forest side on Tuesday night.

The two high-flying teams played out a thrilling 1-1 draw at the City Ground, with the result keeping the visitors six points clear at the top of the Premier League table.

The Reds left with a share of the spoils after Diogo Jota equalised within 22 seconds of his introduction off the bench midway through the second half, scoring with a header from a corner kick delivered by fellow impact substitute Kostas Tsimikas.

Jota takes Nuno by surprise

Nuno had actually managed Liverpool’s current number 20 for four years at Porto and Wolves, but even he was taken aback by the manner in which the 28-year-old salvaged a point for Arne Slot’s team last night.

The Forest manager said of LFC’s equaliser (via Liverpool Echo): “We had been really good at (defending) set-pieces. I didn’t see the images but Diogo, I had him for some time and he is a threat in the box, but I didn’t expect him to score from a set-piece. There had been a slight change for Liverpool and we wanted to make a change at that moment.”

Nuno caught out by rare headed goal for Jota

With respect to Nuno, not many people would’ve had Jota scoring with a header from a corner kick on their pre-match bingo card last night, especially when he’d only been on the pitch for a matter of seconds.

The 28-year-old registered just one headed goal in his four years under the current Forest manager, and Tuesday was only the fourth time that he scored with that particular body part since the start of the 2022/23 campaign (Transfermarkt).

Also, it was just the third set-piece goal that Liverpool have plundered in the Premier League this season, the third-lowest tally in the division after Southampton (two) and Fulham (one), via WhoScored.

Slot acknowledged afterwards that Jota scoring with his first touch after coming on for Ibrahima Konate was a stroke of ‘luck’ rather than a ‘tactical masterclass’, a viewpoint with which Nuno might be inclined to agree.

However, much like his team on the pitch, the Forest boss was evidently caught off guard by the timely aerial prowess of the Reds’ number 20, who conjured up the textbook example of the phrase ‘impact substitute’ at the City Ground last night!

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