Suarez vs Sturridge: Who will win the golden boot this season?

Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge

Liverpool’s fearsome strike partnership of Luis Suarez and Daniel Sturridge has terrorised defences all season and it looks like it will never end. The Reds are the dark horses in the title race and their goal-scoring duo have all the ability to blast them to glory even if Graeme Sounness says the pair need trophies to be compared to Rush and Dalglish.

The pair have a battle of their own going on, though. Suarez tops the Golden Boot chart with 23 goals but Sturridge is closing in on his teammate and has racked up an impressive 18 himself. With 11 games left of the closest Premier League season ever, who will win the coveted award?

Daniel Sturridge

Sturridge has been in sparkling form this season. Prior to the injury that kept him out of action for eight Premier League games, he’d scored 9 goals in 12 league appearances and was leading the Liverpool forward line well in the absence of Suarez. However, the Uruguayan took charge of Christmas – in Sturridge’s absence – and shot up to the top of the scoring charts with ease.

Daniel Sturridge stats

Since Sturridge returned against Stoke City, though, Brendan Rodgers has utilised his strikers differently. One now plays centrally and the other drifts out wide – most of the time it has been Sturridge through the middle, which has worked wonderfully well. He has scored during his last eight league games, racking up 10 goals in the process. Suarez’s goal tally has taken a bit of a hit with the change in system, though, and has scored just once in his last six matches.

Suarez Chances Created – PL 2013/14

With the form Sturridge is showing – and it looks like it will continue right into the final dying embers of the season – he could overtake Suarez in the scoring charts. The Uruguayan has been creating a lot more goals recently and now holds the joint highest number of assists in the Premier League. He sits top of both the assists and scoring charts but with Sturridge’s form and confidence in front of goal, that could be eradicated quickly.

If Rodgers continues to use the current system to effect and keep Sturridge scoring, there is every chance he could score the required number of goals to surpass Suarez and claim the Golden Boot. The Englishman was poor in the FA Cup defeat to Arsenal and should have scored. Some strikers would have let that affect them but Sturridge threw that out of the window to score within two minutes against Swansea at the weekend. He grabbed another later on in the first-half to take him to just five goals behind Suarez.

Since returning from injury, Sturridge has gone from 9 goals to 18 and Suarez has moved from 20 to 23. The swing in goals has changed once again at Liverpool and Sturridge is on fire and astonishingly still at 11/2 on the Betfair exchange to be top goalscorer come the end of the season. Should he carry on the way he’s been playing, he will surpass Luis Suarez and claim the Golden Boot for himself.