Stephen Warnock felt that one reported Liverpool transfer target had a ‘quiet’ performance despite his nation progressing in the World Cup on Saturday.
France became the second team to advance to the quarter-finals after a tempestuous 1-0 win over Paraguay, with the 2018 winners now facing Morocco in the last eight.
Among the starters for Les Bleus in Philadelphia was Bradley Barcola, who Fabrizio Romano has labelled a ‘serious target’ at Anfield, although the Paris Saint-Germain forward wasn’t at his best in a bad-tempered contest.
With the game still scoreless early in the second half, Warnock said on co-commentary for BBC One: “Barcola needs to get more involved in the game. He was quiet in the first half and really hasn’t had too much of an effect.”
As it happened, within a couple of minutes of those words being uttered, the France forward burst beyond Paraguay right-back Juan Caceres before passing the ball through the legs of another opponent.
That was to be his last notable involvement in the match, though, as he was duly substituted for Désiré Doué.
It wasn’t just Warnock who put the microscope on Barcola’a performance, either – The Telegraph’s Sam Dean claimed (via X) that the PSG player was ‘comparatively very quiet’ in relation to his teammates.
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Barcola – who reportedly ‘could be tempted‘ by a summer move to Liverpool – had a mixed outing for France on Saturday, with figures from Sofascore highlighting strong and weak points to his performance.
He completed all 13 passes that he attempted, along with five dribbles, and won seven duels in total. However, his only shot of the match was off target and he recorded a meagre xG of 0.04, and he lost the ball 10 times from just 30 touches, a rather unflattering one-in-three ratio.
In the 23-year-old’s defence, Les Bleus as a collective weren’t at their best in an attritional contest in Philadelphia, needing a penalty to preserve their hopes of making it to a third consecutive World Cup final.
Considering Barcola’s apparent status as Liverpool’s primary transfer target and his own comments on his future in recent days, FSG are unlikely to be deterred by one subdued outing last night as they seek to atone for Yan Diomande choosing PSG over the Reds.
If Richard Hughes is indeed serious about trying to land the French attacker, hopefully he won’t delay in testing the Parisians’ resolve with an offer for the player, so that LFC can try to get a deal wrapped up sooner rather than later.
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