After the drought, the deluge. 2021 has been a testing year for Liverpool, and they finally snapped into their best form as the season drew to a close in the month of May. Five wins out of five, 13 goals scored and only three conceded.

Having struggled to find goals to review for many of these monthly round-ups, there would be no such issues here. But instead we’ll be taking a look at the season as a whole, and the 83 league and European goals contained within. Whose goals were the most valuable? Who was involved in the build up to most goal scoring moves? And why isn’t this whole article a 5,000 word love letter to Alisson Becker?

If you’d like a spreadsheet of the raw data to play around with, tuck in here. And if you’d rather simply see what I managed to extract from the information, keep reading. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, this.

Goal importance

All goals are equal but some are more equal than others. They might give your side the lead, they perhaps reduce the deficit from four to three, or they may stretch the lead to seven purely to make Roy Hodgson’s day that little bit worse.

All of these scenarios were seen from Liverpool’s perspective in 2020/21, so let’s see who was responsible. Nobody here needs reminding that Mohamed Salah was top scorer, so let’s add a little value to the goals.

Five points are awarded for a go-ahead goal, four for an equaliser, three if doubling the lead, two if the Reds were either two goals up or two down at the time, and one for any others. Penalties have been excluded so that Salah doesn’t have an unfair advantage.

If we’re looking at players with more than two goals, then Diogo Jota has won the inagural Tomkins Times’ Goal Importance trophy. That’s not bad going when almost a quarter of his strikes occurred as a hat-trick in a 5-0 victory, while his first goal rounded off a 3-1 win.

And although there was no points bonus for scoring the winning/decisive goal in a one-goal win, the Portuguese forward was the only Liverpool player to bag more than one of these – settling games with Sheffield United, West Ham and Wolves – so he undoubtedly deserves the award.

This in-depth article is for TTT subscribers only. See below for details of how to subscribe for £5 a month.

[ttt-subscribe-article]