Liverpool have reportedly made contact with Tottenham over a possible deal for Paulo Gazzaniga after Adrian’s less-than-convincing performance in the side’s 7-2 defeat to Aston Villa.
First-choice goalkeeper Alisson could be out for as long as six weeks with a shoulder injury, meaning Adrian has started in the Brazilian’s place for Liverpool’s last two matches.
And while Adrian will have been desperate to make an impression on Sunday, passing the ball straight to Jack Grealish to gift Villa and Ollie Watkins the opening goal of the game in only the 4th minute was probably not what he had in mind.
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Adrian’s afternoon soon went from bad to worse as Dean Smith’s men – who narrowly avoided relegation last term – ran riot and the Spaniard was forced to pick the ball out the back of his net seven times in one of the most stunning scorelines in Premier League history.
Watkins went on to complete a first-half hat-trick, Grealish scored a brace and John McGinn and Ross Barkley also got on the scoresheet and Liverpool are eyeing some last-minute business as a result of their shambolic display at the back.
According to The Independent, the Merseyside giants have registered a strong interest in Spurs back-up ‘keeper Gazzaniga and have approached the north London outfit to gauge the Argentine’s potential availability with just hours remaining of the summer transfer window.
Gazzaniga is yet to play a single minute for Tottenham this season, with club captain Hugo Lloris starting every league match and summer arrival Joe Hart the preferred choice in the Europa League thus far.
The report claims a goalkeeper is at the top of Jurgen Klopp’s wishlist as a result of Adrian’s struggles and the injury to Alisson, with the German desperate to get Liverpool’s defence back on track.
Klopp jumped to Adrian’s defence in the wake of Liverpool’s defeat and said the goalkeeper received little help from his team-mates in front of him.
‘Not only because of tonight, it’s now easy and people are like this – I’m not sure if journalists are like this as well – but now people will go for Adrian and stuff like this,’ he said.
‘Yes, the first goal was not cool, of course. But apart from that, I don’t think he had anything to do with all the other goals pretty much.
‘We didn’t help him tonight, let me say it like this, or we even did the opposite. He’s a really good goalie who played 11 [Premier League] games for us last year and I think we won pretty much all of them.
‘It’s all fine. Our goalie was not the problem. Only around the first goal. And the reaction for that first goal was not his problem, that was then our problem. We have to do that better, we can do that better.’
The German added: ‘It’s quite strange when you see a game like this, not that I saw these games like 20 times from my team, I see all these things and I’m old enough to know strange things can happen in life and in football.
‘But I saw all the things that happened tonight and I know that if you lose the decisive challenges you will lose football games. We did that tonight.
‘If you protect your own offensive stuff not properly, you will get in trouble. And we got in trouble tonight. And all these things happened tonight.
‘You could see in moments – and I don’t think I had to say that a lot – but tonight in different challenges Aston Villa definitely wanted it more than us.
‘That’s something I saw and I don’t like obviously, but now the boys go to their national teams and when they come back – hopefully healthy, all of them – then we have two days’ time to prepare the Everton game and then we have the chance to do better.’
The Reds will be desperate to put their thumping at Villa behind them and have the perfect opportunity to bounce back after the international break when they travel to bitter rivals Everton, who sit top of the table with a 100 per cent record in the top flight.
