Lewis Koumas Shines in Liverpool's Carabao Cup Victory
Lewis Koumas stood in the mixed zone with a trophy in one hand and his phone in the other, still in full kit, still buzzing. Before he spoke to anyone with a microphone, he made the call that mattered most.
“That was my mum,” the Liverpool forward said, grin fixed, eyes still wide from the night. Moments earlier Cody Gakpo had handed him the man of the match award after a 3-1 Carabao Cup third-round win over Tottenham at Anfield. “She was here tonight with my nan, my granddad and my sister. They were all in the box. I rang them straight away to show them the trophy and they were buzzing.”
It was a scene that told you exactly what this meant: a local lad shining for his boyhood club, drinking in every second.
A forward made for Iraola’s Liverpool
What it takes to survive in Andoni Iraola’s front line was on show from the first whistle. What it takes to impress him was, too.
The Liverpool head coach had not been shy in his demands after Saturday’s flat draw with Fulham, firing a pointed warning at his more established forwards. He wanted aggression. He wanted pressing. He wanted forwards who would run, chase, harry and make life miserable for defenders.
Koumas was not really part of that conversation beforehand. By full-time, he had made himself central to it.
The 20-year-old ran himself into the ground against Roberto De Zerbi’s defence, constantly dragging centre-backs into places they did not want to go, creating gaps and angles for others to exploit. He snapped into challenges, pressed from the front and never stopped offering an outlet. Anfield felt it. So did his manager.
“The energy he shows is contagious,” Iraola said afterwards. “I’m very happy for him. He does it in training every day. He is very clear what he needs to do, what the team needs.”
Koumas turns 21 on Saturday, the day before Liverpool travel to Iraola’s former club Bournemouth. He listened to the praise, absorbed it, and then framed it in the only way he knows.
“I think how I play is ultimately the Liverpool way,” he said. “We’ve always been a club where players have to give absolutely everything on the pitch. We’re bringing that back now and the crowd are loving it.
“A lot of it is about what I do off the ball. The gaffer has shown trust to me that I can carry out his plans in terms of how we want to play tactically. I was happy to do that for him. It gives me so much motivation the fact he’s putting me in for a game like this. I want to kick on now.”
From loan circuits to Anfield nights
Iraola’s trust did not come out of nowhere. Within weeks of arriving in the summer, he told then sporting director Richard Hughes that Koumas was staying put. No more loans. No more short-term fixes elsewhere. He wanted the Chester-born forward in his first-team squad.
Koumas had already turned heads on Liverpool’s pre-season tour of the United States. The son of former Tranmere Rovers and West Bromwich Albion playmaker Jason Koumas, he has been steadily ticking off milestones since: Premier League debut off the bench, Champions League appearance, and now his first senior man of the match award.
Could he have seen any of this coming when he reported back for pre-season?
“No, I would have woken up!” the Wales international laughed. “I would have thought I was dreaming. It’s crazy. But I’m just really happy and very grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given. You never know when your last time on the pitch for Liverpool is going to be. I just try to leave everything out there every time.”
The path has not been smooth. Koumas, capped 12 times by Wales, had to wait longer than many expected for a genuine crack at Liverpool’s first team. Jürgen Klopp handed him his first start more than two years ago, and he marked it with a goal in a 3-0 FA Cup fifth-round win over Southampton. Then the door shut again.
He did not play for his boyhood club’s senior side again until Iraola walked through the entrance at Kirkby. Instead, he packed a bag and went out to learn the hard way: Stoke for the 2024-25 season, Birmingham for the first half of 2025-26, Hull for the second.
Those loans could have drained him. He insists they did the opposite.
“I never showed a weak mentality about how the future would look for me at Liverpool,” Koumas said. He namechecks Michael Owen and Gareth Bale as the players who first lit the fire when he was a kid. That fire, he says, never dimmed.
“I always had the drive that I would get here. The reason for going out on loan was to prepare for this moment. A lot of hunger can be lost in the game with how things go. But for me coming through the pre-academy and right through the academy, my hunger has always been there.
“My hunger comes from representing Liverpool Football Club, wanting to give everything for the best club in the world.”
On a cool Anfield night, with his family watching from a box and his manager demanding intensity, that hunger finally met its stage. The question now is not whether Lewis Koumas belongs, but how far this relentless, homegrown forward can push a new-look Liverpool attack.
