Iago Aspas has been in clinical form for Celta Vigo, not that anybody seems to have noticed.
The ‘expensive flop’ tag is a difficult one to shake off.
No matter how many nets you ripple in a foreign league, how many times you inspire your plucky, overachieving outfit to famous triumphs over Barcelona, if you weren’t a revelation in the so-called Greatest League on Earth, then we don’t want to know.
It happened to Claudio Pizarro. It happened, to some extent, to Diego Forlan. But few have bore the brunt of our collective ignorance quite like Iago Aspas. Something of an unknown on English shores when he arrived at Liverpool from Celta Vigo in 2013, the impish Spaniard departed soon after, infamous in all the wrong ways.
He managed one goal, in a 5-1 win against Oldham in the FA Cup, but one moment in particular has come to define his short-lived Anfield career.
A corner against Chelsea in the business end of the 2013/14 season. An admittedly awful corner, drilled straight to the feet of Willian at the edge of the box with Liverpool’s title hopes ebbing away.
Aspas may have scored 20 goals in his last 41 La Liga starts at Celta, many of them a sublime lofted chip that has become his trademark, he may have ripped Barca to shreds for the second season in a row, he may he fully deserving of a first Spain call-up following an injury to Diego Costa, but everything comes back to that corner.
Balotelli scoring goals again in France, Joe Allen pocketing Pogba, and now Iago Aspas getting called up the the Spanish squad.
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