When Lucas left the pitch to make way for 18-year-old Jordan Rossiter, his wave to the Liverpool fans was rather foreboding.
The player continues to be linked elsewhere and many Liverpool fans will take the wave to the traveling Kop as a goodbye.
The substitution was also symbolic. On came the youngster Rossiter who will surely fill Lucas’ void if the Brazilian were to leave.
This is perhaps what makes the thought of Lucas’ departure even more striking. The youngster put in a decent shift after coming on but his ill-fitting kit, huge squad number and fresh face shouted out that this was not a player who was ready to replace Liverpool’s longest-serving player and third-oldest squad member.
The average age of the team that finished the Arsenal game was 23.5 years; furthermore Martin Skrtel and Simon Mignolet were the only two players to have spent more than two seasons at the club.
In a potentially breakthrough season, you cannot expect someone to be the only genuine option in that position, which is what Rossiter would be.
Should Lucas leave, it has been suggested that Emre Can will become Liverpool’s first-choice holding midfielder – a role that he can suitably fill.
The 21-year-old can also play as a centre-back, right-back and left-back. It doesn’t mean that he should.
Can is a remarkable talent; one that would be wasted in a defensive midfield position. His driving forward runs and incisive forward passes are as much part of his game as his defensive abilities.
His best role in the team is as a roaming playmaker or a box-to-box midfielder. If stationed as a defensive midfielder he would naturally shape his game in this way, causing defensive instability – a situation in which Skrtel and Dejan Lovren are prone to panicking.
Lucas is not a player worthy of a team competing for a Champions League place let alone the title but his performance against Arsenal once again showed that he can, more often than not, be relied on to ‘do a job’ to at least a fairly effective level. More than that, he is the only real option that the Reds have.
After the game, Brendan Rodgers described Lucas as Liverpool’s “best defensive midfielder player” – which is not wrong. He shouldn’t be sold, and he certainly should not be loaned out.
The man who has made 275 appearances for the Reds will feel that he would be unlucky to be forced out of the squad.
Should he go, Liverpool fans may be the ones feeling particularly unlucky in the months to come.
