Last chance for Darwin Núñez to turn laughter into legacy

The Guardian

15-03-2025

The prevailing sensation while watching El Chavo del Ocho is to wonder how this thing ever got made in the first place. It's a low-budget Mexican sitcom that ran from the 70s to the 90s, centred on an eight-year-old orphan who lives in a barrel in an apartment complex. The boy is played by Roberto Gómez Bolaños, who was in his 40s when the series began and his 60s when it ended. Pretty much all the humour is derived from slapstick: situational farce, physical jokes, people getting their heads trapped in buckets. That kind of thing.
Try to imagine ChuckleVision gone global, to the point where it was a genuine cultural touchstone for hundreds of millions, to the point where Paul and Barry Chuckle have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and are unable to walk through Manhattan without being mobbed. That's El Chavo. Even today it remains one of the most famous comic creations in the history of television: syndicated across the Americas, enthralling successive generations long after it was decommissioned. Including – at some point in early 2000s Uruguay – a young Darwin Núñez.
El Chavo del Ocho (The Kid at No 8) is Núñez's favourite TV programme. Naturally, I have my own theories about this. El Chavo – whose real name is never revealed – is a clumsy, oversized agent of chaos, often entirely oblivious to the mayhem he creates, pursued wherever he goes by comedy sound effects but possessed of an essential purity, a credulity, a heart of gold and a homespun wisdom that makes it impossible not to root for him, even when he's doing incredibly stupid things. El Chavo, meet thine real-life avatar. His name is Darwin.
Often you will hear it said that Núñez divides opinion. In fact the basic outline of Núñez is pretty much a consensus view at this point: entertaining, endearing and erratic, a richly talented player for whom Liverpool paid slightly over the odds, and who probably needs to be replaced with someone more reliable sooner rather than later. We can pretty much all agree on that. In a sense, there is perhaps no player who divides opinion less than Núñez.
What people are really talking about when they talk about Núñez dividing opinion is his inconsistency. The spectacular finishes, the spectacular misses and the vague whiff of slapstick that seems to follow him wherever he goes. There was a moment during Tuesday's Champions League last‑16 second leg against Paris Saint-Germain when Núñez out-sprinted Luis Díaz in pursuit of Virgil van Dijk's long ball, only to remember about the potential offside flag and start running away from it, with Díaz already having stopped. It's the 81st minute. You're 1-0 down. And now, for the first time in your life, you decide to worry about offside?
The orthodox view of Núñez's Liverpool career is that he is simply a poor fit for what Arne Slot is trying to do: a cat trapped in a grand piano, a maverick in a team seeking immaculate control, of emotions as well as the ball. Virtually all his metrics are significantly down from the Jürgen Klopp era: goals, expected goals, expected assists, key passes, dribbles, touches, shots and shots on target. This season Liverpool perform a goal a game worse when he is on the pitch than when he is not. A big Liverpool clearout is expected this summer and the word is they will listen to a serious offer for Núñez.
And so to Wembley on Sunday and a game that feels – for Núñez and Núñez alone – like a kind of last chance. Núñez may not start the Carabao Cup final against Newcastle. Diogo Jota could easily slot in up front; Díaz has intermittently impressed as a false No 9. At some point, whether it is for 90 minutes or 90 seconds, the skies will darken and Núñez will make his appearance: a one-man forcefield, a player who somehow bends the waves of the game around him.
He was born into poverty, suffered a cruciate injury at the age of 19 that put him out of the game for a year and a half and convinced him he would never kick a ball again. If there is any kind of vulnerability there, it is one driven by pure hunger, the high-stakes caprice of a man who still expects nothing good to last long, who will make every moment count or die trying.
There is one metric in which he has significantly improved this season: tackles and interceptions. With his minutes restricted, Núñez has tried to make every single one count. His goals against Brentford, Southampton and Aston Villa have been crucial in the title challenge. And for all the focus on his missed penalty in the shootout against PSG this week, his contribution to Harvey Elliott's winning goal in the first leg has been almost forgotten.
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Largely, you suspect, this is an issue of personal branding. Signed in the wake of Erling Haaland joining Manchester City, Núñez quickly found himself fitted for the role of talisman, immediately judged by goals and goals alone. Roberto Firmino, the man he partially replaced, went 13 league games without scoring in the 2019-20 title-winning season and it was fine. Núñez has never gone that long without a goal in his life and yet the perception persists – fuelled by a projection of the player people want him to be rather than the player he is – that he is some kind of gilded failure.
He misses big chances. But so does Haaland, so does Ollie Watkins, so does any striker with the faith to put himself about, to make the right runs, to try. The Premier League has only been collecting 'big chance' data since 2010 but in that time the three players with the most big misses are Mohamed Salah, Harry Kane and Sergio Agüero. Maybe we need to chill out a bit about the missing, particularly in a team evidently scoring more than enough for now.
Is El Chavo del Ocho a comedy or a tragedy? On first viewing, El Chavo is quite clearly a ridiculous comic figure. But, of course, over time, you begin to suspend your disbelief, to invest in the story, to embed yourself in the universe the writers created. He, too, grew up in poverty, was forsaken and ridiculed, and yet despite spending most of his time in a barrel has made himself a viable life, a reason to get up in the morning, a network of friends. For all the mishaps and chaos, the bonds between them endure.
The real business of any football club is not the pursuit of numbers but the pursuit of memories. Divock Origi is still remembered fondly for the big goals he scored and Sunday's final offers a similar chance for Núñez to write himself into the club's folklore. He may have been signed on his numbers, but will bequeath only memories. His Liverpool future may well be beyond his control. But his legacy is not.