Mohamed Salah’s most alluring characteristic is that he occasionally does things that are downright awful.
He will play a 10-yard pass into touch, three yards behind its intended target. He will miscontrol the ball on the touchline and stare at the ground to curse the imaginary bobble. He will shank a shot that other strikers would score. And then he will do something so magical it forces you to emit an involuntary yelp.
That fallibility is crucial because it gives Salah a tangible air. He is a private person who rarely speaks at length in public nor gets involved in social media discussion. Were his brilliance to be the gloriously consistent kind, he may seem a little robotic. But that yawning chasm between his worst and best moments not only make the latter more conspicuous, they make him seem eminently human.
Unfortunately for that particular character arc, the mistakes are happening less and less often while the transcendent moments, those times when Salah grabs a match between two elite clubs and wrestles it to match his own will, are increasing in regularity. He excels most at finding pockets of unguarded space, staying quiet like a child desperately hoping the adults at the party won’t notice them and pack them off to bed. No player in the Premier League is able to go from serenity to causing maximum danger more quickly.
We must beware of hyperbole here, not least because mentioning these two names sends up a bat signal for people who like to argue on the football internet. But there were strands of Lionel Messi in Salah’s attacking contributions against Manchester City: deliberately drifting from the main stage, leaving excellent opponents kicking thin air, choosing his weaker foot for a surprise shot. Anyone who has seen Salah’s torso will concur that he has a Cristiano Ronaldo-style dedication to physical preparation.
The numbers aren’t far behind either. Since joining Liverpool in the summer of 2017 – and despite playing in a division where competition between elite clubs is fiercer than anywhere else – Salah has scored 101 league goals. He is comfortably the Premier League’s top scorer over that period and ranks joint second for assists too. Salah is hardly a luxury player either; Klopp regularly insists that the best moments of a Salah performance are when he’s fighting for the cause.
Over the course of the last nine months, there has been an increasing urge from those around Anfield to ensure that Salah is given his due recognition. Jurgen Klopp was the first to speak out, remarking in February that the lack of praise for Salah was “unexplainable”. Jamie Carragher recently followed suit on Sky Sports, hinting that Salah is underrated. Perhaps this is a strategy to ensure that FSG understands his importance and delivers that new contract, perhaps not.
In fairness, Klopp played a significant role in Salah’s lack of individual praise. He arrived at Liverpool with a socialist mantra that the collective must be greater than any individual, famously warning any player who wanted to “behave like a single star” that they should take up darts instead. Liverpool’s rise to Champions League and Premier League success was platformed by the strength of their team spirit.
Within that collective were a group of interconnected systems, of which Salah formed one alongside Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino. The brilliance of Liverpool’s front three lay in a shared understanding and ability to create for each other. Goals were generally shared around. Salah scored one more goal in all competitions than Mane in 2018-19 with Firmino scoring 10 fewer than Mane; that same pattern was repeated exactly in 2019-20. They were praised and (rarely) criticised as a whole rather than in component parts.
Since then, Salah has entered a different realm of goalscoring just as first Firmino’s and then Mane’s form started to dip; he scored 41 goals last season to Mane’s 21. His chance creation has slightly dipped too, and his 13 assists in 2019-20 dropped to six last season. Salah is clearly still willing to create for his colleagues (see his assist for Mane on Sunday), but has noticeably become a little more selfish.
And that’s no bad thing. Klopp, who once spoke only of the team, has relaxed his stance in the face of Salah’s supercharged brilliance in 2021. “Strikers have to be selfish,” he said in April. “I have never met an unselfish striker. You can be the nicest person in the world but in the end you want to score goals and that means you do not see players in the same shirt. Salah is just a natural goalscorer, he wants to score goals.”
Perhaps that selfishness, combined with the slight drop from Mane and Firmino, has simply caused Salah’s brilliance to become more obvious and thus led to the demands for more recognition?
There is another theory, though: the Harry Kane syndrome. When Salah joined Liverpool for £34m in 2017, he had never before scored more than 15 goals in a league season and had been cast aside at Chelsea after a series of middling performances. Like Kane, there was no gradual rise to prominence back in the Premier League. He hit the ground at sprinting speed and completed the marathon without stopping for breath. The exception became the normal before our expectations had caught up to meet it.
As is so often the case, witnessing greatness in real time can be hard to process. Only in hindsight can we truly measure a person’s brilliance because only then can we experience the same art without them. Perhaps that is why there is so much demand for Salah to be given his due acclaim? With the contract left unsigned, Liverpool supporters are preparing themselves to lose one of their modern greats. They are desperate to celebrate his majesty while they still get to witness it.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/2YtUfmp
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