Just for a moment, opportunity knocked for Joe Gomez.
From an unfamiliar role at left-back, his pace carried him into the Arsenal penalty area and, cutting infield onto his right foot and up against William Saliba, the Liverpool defender could see space opening up, the white of the uprights and a gap inside the far post.
His footwork was perfect, three deft touches to tee himself up, as he assessed the opportunity before curling his shot around Saliba, beyond David Raya and… agonisingly, by a matter of inches, just the wrong side of the Arsenal goal.
It was an opportunity missed on an evening, just before Christmas, when Liverpool could not quite get the better of their fellow Premier League title challengers, but Jurgen Klopp loved what he had just seen; grinning, applauding and gesturing to the crowd to show their appreciation.
There have been a few moments like that for Gomez lately — a header against the crossbar away to Toulouse in the Europa League, a shot into the side-netting against Manchester United, a decent effort saved in the Carabao Cup quarter-final against West Ham United — but as one career milestone looms, two games from his 200th appearance for the club, he is still waiting to score his first goal in senior football.
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“I dream about that sometimes,” Gomez told The Athletic in an interview in 2020. “It comes out from a corner and I score in front of the Kop. Maybe one day.”
But not yet.
It is the longest such run for any outfield player in this season’s Premier League. Bournemouth midfielder Lewis Cook and West Ham United defender Vladimir Coufal are yet to score in the competition (in 117 and 108 appearances respectively) but have scored previously in their club careers. Gomez has not scored in 125 Premier League appearances, a further 73 cup matches for Liverpool and 24 in all competitions for his only other team, Charlton Athletic: 222 senior appearances at club level, plus 11 for England (and another 31 representing his country at various youth levels).
Gomez did score for Liverpool in an under-23s match, against their Reading counterparts, in March 2017 while on his way back to fitness after injury — and an adroit finish it was, meeting Harry Wilson’s corner with a side-foot volley. But that is not classed as a match at senior level, so officially he is still to get off the mark.
In the Premier League era, Gomez is 19th on the list of outfield players who have played most matches without scoring, but he is rising fast, overtaking former Tottenham Hotspur full-back Dean Austin, former Blackburn Rovers and Portsmouth midfielder Aaron Mokoena and former Stoke City full-back Andy Wilkinson in recent weeks. Another 16 games without a goal would bring him level with Paulo Ferreira (three Premier League titles, but no goals in the competition for Chelsea).
That list is led by former Ireland defender Kenny Cunningham, who made 335 appearances in the Premier League for Wimbledon and Birmingham City without scoring. Next up are Tony Hibbert (265 Premier League appearances for Everton) and Des Walker (264 Premier League appearances for Sheffield Wednesday, having — famously — scored just once in 407 appearances in all competitions for Nottingham Forest).
Maybe it is just a coincidence, but Hibbert and Walker are renowned as two of the most private footballers of the Premier League era, as averse to interviews as they were to shooting. Some of the others above Gomez on the list (former Liverpool defenders Stephane Henchoz and Rob Jones, to name but two) are also private, self-effacing types.
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Maybe the first rule of the Goalless Wonders Club is that you do not talk about the Goalless Wonders Club.
Cunningham seems a more likely bet, having done some punditry since hanging up his boots in 2007, but he tells The Athletic he would prefer to keep his media work to a minimum. He does say rather self-deprecatingly, though, that if he were to list his biggest regrets from his football career, “not contributing to the team with more goals” — and he did score twice for Millwall before reaching the Premier League — “doesn’t even make the list”.
Joking aside, that is the point really.
Cunningham’s job was never remotely about scoring goals. The same applies to Hibbert, Walker, Jones, Henchoz, Ferreira, Gomez, Coufal and everyone else on the list.
As Klopp has pointed out, the qualities that have made Gomez Liverpool’s longest-serving player — the only senior player still on the books who preceded the German’s arrival in October 2015 — are all about his defensive instincts, his timing, his athleticism and the determination he has shown in overcoming a series of long-term injuries.
But lately, Gomez has looked like a man on a mission.
Across the first seven Premier League campaigns he played in for Liverpool, spanning 108 appearances, he had 12 shots — an average of one shot every 527 minutes. Last season’s total of six shots equated to one every 244. This season? Eleven in his first 17 Premier League appearances (eight starts), an average of one every 84 minutes. In five appearances in the Europa League, he has threatened even more (one shot every 69 minutes).
Filling in at left-back for the injured Andy Robertson and Kostas Tsimikas has brought unexpected freedom for Gomez to roam forward in open play, moving infield onto his favoured right foot. Two second-half chances against Arsenal (one on his left foot, which was saved) and one at Sheffield United reinforced the feeling, expressed by LFC TV commentator John Bradley, that “it’s coming” for Gomez.
Some Liverpool fans will recall a similar feeling regarding Jones, a skilful right-back who made 243 appearances for the club in the 1990s. He, too, had some of his better opportunities when playing on the left-hand side rather than his preferred right, but — to the ritual hilarity of Saturday morning football magazine show Soccer AM — he never quite found the net.
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“Fans always say to me, ‘I used to put a pound on you (to score). You lost me so much money!’,” Jones told The Anfield Wrap in 2012. “I was close so many times. I must admit I cocked up some of those chances right up, but I hit the post a couple of times, the crossbar and I remember one, Man City away, and I just had no luck.”
By 1990s standards, Jones was an attack-minded right-back, which made his non-goalscoring record all the more surprising. By contrast, Gomez is primarily a central defender who has shown he can fill in at right-back and, lately, left-back. Unlike, for example, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Reece James, he settled into defence relatively early in his journey at academy level.
Even now, having taken more shots than ever before, Gomez’s expected-goals (xG) figure this season in 25 appearances across all competitions is a mere 0.7. According to Opta, his highest-quality single chance, a left-foot volley at home to Toulouse in the Europa League, had an xG of only 0.16.
In other words, he has not been missing sitters.
Taking a closer look at the data, where Gomez has been guilty on occasions — particularly in the 0-0 draw with Manchester United, where he was far from the only culprit — is shooting in moments of desperation.
Of the 24 shots he has taken in all competitions since the start of last season, no fewer than 14 happened when Liverpool have been drawing or losing. Ten of those 14 have had an xG value of 0.05 or less. Three of those 10 low-quality chances have come in stoppage time, with his team chasing a winner or equaliser.
It is a similar story with Coufal.
His shot map as a West Ham player shows 34 with a total xG of 2.4 but, in 46 Premier League appearances since the start of last season, he has had just eight, none with a higher xG value than 0.07. Six of those were taken from outside the penalty area — though the one that looks absurd on his shot map, from 43 yards out away to Leeds United last January, was an audacious effort that narrowly missed the target with goalkeeper Illan Meslier stranded.
Coufal was, after all, a reasonably regular goalscorer in his Czech homeland at Slovan Liberec and Slavia Prague.
As for Cook, he scored twice for Leeds as a teenager and twice for Bournemouth, also in the Championship, but he has played a more restrained midfield role in the Premier League. Of the 44 shots he has attempted in the competition, only five have been from inside the penalty area.
They add up to a total xG of 1.4, the best of them (with a tiny 0.08 xG) a right-foot effort against Southampton in October 2018.
Some players seem destined not to get on the scoresheet. One of the purest examples — a player whose goal drought extended beyond the Premier League to all competitions and across his entire career — was Hibbert, who made 328 senior appearances for Everton, his only club, without scoring.
Everton fans honoured their non-scoring full-back with a banner that declared “Hibbo scores, we riot”.
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Finally, after 12 years and 308 first-team appearances, they got their chance in his testimonial match against AEK Athens at Goodison Park in August 2012, when he was allowed to take a free kick — and proceeded to drill it low into the net at the Gwladys Street End, prompting the promised pitch invasion.
In a rare interview with the Official Everton Podcast in 2021, Hibbert said he had been desperate to get a take a free kick — “Come on, give me a chance, the only time I’m going to get is this one now!” — and was “convinced” he would score. “And I knew the fans would get on the pitch,” he said.
As David Moyes, Everton’s manager at the time, pointed out afterwards, it wasn’t one of those contrived goals you sometimes get in testimonial matches. “I’ve been putting the wrong guy on free kicks for too long,” Moyes said — though Hibbert didn’t get too many more opportunities before he retired four years later without an official goal for his hometown club.
But it is still some way off the English record for most appearances by an outfield player without scoring.
That honour is unlikely to be wrestled from Frank Womack, who made his debut for Birmingham City in 1908 and made 515 appearances for them over the next 20 years, as well as another 20 for Torquay United, without getting on the scoresheet.
That was in an era when most full-backs — as their job title suggests — rarely went forward. Liverpool had such a player in Ephraim Longworth, who made 371 competitive appearances for the club but never scored (other than in war-time matches, which are not recognised as official fixtures).
“Some backs love to roam and I am convinced by practical effects that they are wrong,” Longworth was quoted as telling the Liverpool Echo. “I don’t disagree with any full-back going forward when he sees the open door, as it were, but as a rule, it is wrong for full-backs to wander. There is the vital necessity of defence to be remembered — and any defence spread-eagled is asking for a peck of trouble.”
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That remained the conventional wisdom within football for decades. Even now, there is a sense of bewilderment among some when they see, for example, Alexander-Arnold or Arsenal’s Oleksandr Zinchenko being given the freedom not just to “roam” from full-back but to operate in midfield when their team are in possession.
Stylistically, the game has evolved so much over the past decade in particular.
But, even now, there is still a place for full-backs whose first instincts are defensive — and whose occasional attempts on the opposition goal are made not in expectation but in the hope that, one day, they will be the one disappearing under a pile of celebrating team-mates as the net bulges, the crowd roars and eventually, after a tense VAR check that feels almost as interminable as the wait that has gone before, their membership of the Goalless Wonders Club is revoked.
(Top photo: Paul Ellis/AFP via Getty Images)
