{"id":804757,"date":"2026-10-16T18:52:09","date_gmt":"2026-10-16T18:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/804757\/"},"modified":"2026-10-16T18:52:09","modified_gmt":"2026-10-16T18:52:09","slug":"lewis-koumas-feel-good-story-gives-liverpool-something-to-smile-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/804757\/","title":{"rendered":"Lewis Koumas: Feel-good story gives Liverpool something to smile about"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first player to celebrate with Lewis Koumas in front of the travelling supporters in Linz was Liverpool<\/a>‘s hat-trick hero in Bradley Barcola.<\/p>\n

This time last season, Koumas was on loan at Birmingham in the Championship while Barcola was at Paris St-Germain, who went on to win the Champions League for the second season in a row.<\/p>\n

Quite a chain of events led to the pair starting together for Liverpool<\/a> in their 6-3 win over LASK.<\/a><\/p>\n

And as Barcola left the Raiffeisen Arena with the match ball after a superb hat-trick, the Frenchman knew that he wasn’t the only player who put the ball in the net three times on Wednesday in Austria.<\/p>\n

Koumas had his first two strikes ruled out for offside, but thankfully it was third time luck for the 21-year-old Wales international.<\/p>\n

And so, just three days after making his first Premier League start against Manchester City<\/a> – with Alexander Isak, Cody Gakpo and Hugo Ekitike all injured – Koumas became the youngest Liverpool<\/a> player to score and assist in a Champions League game.<\/p>\n

Previously, the youngest to achieve the feat had been Steven Gerrard in 2001.<\/p>\n

When that was put to him, Koumas wanted to know “Is that official?”.<\/p>\n

“It’s not a bad stat, is it?” he said. “And it’s not a bad name to be alongside. Wow. What a legend. I just want more of this.”<\/p>\n

He is enjoying his run in the first team but staying level-headed about it all, keen to point out: “This is my job.”<\/p>\n

“I need to get goals and assists,” he said. “I hadn’t had any before Linz so it was really important to get them.”<\/p>\n

In a Liverpool<\/a> side where attention tends to be directed towards big-money names, Koumas provides a real feel-good story.<\/p>\n

He joined Liverpool<\/a> aged 11 and scored on his first-team debut<\/a> as an 18-year-old under Jurgen Klopp.<\/p>\n

After spells on loan at Stoke, Birmingham and Hull<\/a>, where he helped the Tigers win promotion last season, Andoni Iraola decided in the first week of pre-season that Koumas was part of his Liverpool<\/a> plans.<\/p>\n

He made his Premier League debut at Newcastle<\/a> before coming on against Atletico Madrid in the Champions League. He was man of the match on his first start of the season against Tottenham<\/a> in the Carabao Cup after an energetic performance which left Iraola describing his playing style as “contagious”.<\/p>\n

That night, Koumas went straight on a video call with his family after the game and it was the case again in Austria after he scored his first goal of the season.<\/p>\n

“It was probably the best feeling in my career, 100%. I’m just really grateful to have the opportunity again,” said Koumas.<\/p>\n

“I would not have been a happy man [if I didn’t score], I would have been gutted. I just kept going because I knew the more the game was going on, it was opening up.<\/p>\n

“Going over to the fans at the end meant absolutely everything. They are the reason we do this and that we want this job. I wish I could have got in there with them, but there was a big metal cage in the way!”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first player to celebrate with Lewis Koumas in front of the travelling supporters in Linz was Liverpool‘s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":804758,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[59,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-804757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-gb","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=804757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/804757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/804758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=804757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=804757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=804757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}