How Daniel Sturridge became Liverpool’s perfect super sub in 25 minutes

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Perhaps it is because he is so used to returning from injury that Daniel Sturridge never takes long to getting back up to speed with Premier League football.

Time on the sidelines is now just a constant and expected undercurrent to Sturridge’s career. It didn’t take long after Jurgen Klopp arrived at Liverpool for the manager to say Sturridge needed to learn the difference between “serious pain and only pain”, clearly frustrated at just how often he had to make do without the striker.

Three years on – and 16 different injuries or illnesses later – Sturridge is at a strange point in his development: he is 29 years old and should, therefore, be around about his peak. The six months he spent on loan at relegated West Brom last season were absolutely nowhere near the best of his career, though.

But after a summer of being linked with a move away from Anfield and £170 million in new signings, Sturridge has a new-found importance at Liverpool, and one that fits him perfectly given how prone he is to injury.

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Klopp has decided to manage Sturridge’s minutes extremely carefully as he eases him back into first team life at the club. Over the course of five Premier League appearances from the bench this season, Sturridge has played only 25 minutes.

With a start against Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League and a full 90 minutes against Chelsea in the Carabao Cup last week, he has started to prove his fitness, but history tells us not to even begin to start relying on Sturridge. Presumably there was a good reason Klopp waited until the 86th minute to introduce Sturridge at Stamford Bridge this weekend when his team had already been chasing an equaliser for an hour.

Sturridge’s league appearances this season have lasted three, one, ten, seven and four minutes, but instead of injury ending his time on the pitch, it has been the final whistle.

In those 25 minutes, Sturridge has scored two goals. That’s as many as Roberto Firmino has in 592 minutes, as many as Alexandre Lacazette in 456 minutes and one more than Chelsea strikers Alvaro Morata and Olivier Giroud have in a combined ten-and-a-half hours.

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Sturridge has had four shots so far this season, therefore averaging an attempt at goal every six minutes and 15 seconds.

That isn’t a sustainable rate over 90 minutes, particularly for a player with the injury problems Sturridge has, but what it does suggest is that he needs no time to warm up. He doesn’t need time to find his range or get up to speed. This is a player who can be at his best immediately after being brought on.

He is not the most clinical of strikers, with what is a fairly middling conversion rate of 18.6 per cent since he joined Liverpool, but he gets enough shots off to retain serious impacy. Since January 2013, Luis Suarez is the only player to average more shots per 90 minutes in the Premier League than Sturridge’s 3.8.

As a result, he has the eighth-best minutes per goal rate of all players with 50 or more Premier League goals, ahead of Diego Costa and Alan Shearer but less than two minutes per goal behind Robin van Persie and Edin Dzeko.

After Saturday’s rocket at Chelsea, only Jermain Defoe and Giroud sit above Sturridge in the list of highest-scoring substitutes in the Premier League era.

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