Salah’s touch of class shows why Liverpool were right to give him a new contract

Liverpool 2-1 West Ham (Diaz 18′, Van Dijk 89′ | Robertson 86′ OG)

ANFIELD — Football is a sport that drowns in statistics and on Merseyside there is only one that matters. Liverpool now require another six points to win the championship. It is a line they are due to cross on 27 April at Anfield, where they face Tottenham Hotspur, whose resistance is expected to be blancmange-like.

Virgil van Dijk had been irritated by a question from Michael Owen that Liverpool “only” winning the Premier League after their elimination from the Champions League and failure in the Carabao Cup final would leave “a bitter taste”. The Liverpool captain pointed out that the Premier League was the culmination of nine months’ work.

He might have told Owen, who was interviewing him for Premier League Productions, that the title is the measure by which the elite have always judged themselves. Fittingly, it was Van Dijk’s header, a minute from the finish, that salvaged a victory in another match in which Liverpool appeared to have lost control.

Their 20th title will be won at a trot rather than a gallop. Owen would have been right if he had said that something had gone from Liverpool’s soul after the defeat by Paris Saint-Germain here.

To win the title in your first season as manager, as Arne Slot will do, is an immense achievement. It will be the result of other clubs’ failure to mount a sustained challenge and Liverpool’s relentlessness in the first two-thirds of the season. The fear is that this could be Manchester United 2013 – the last gasp of a great team.

The build-up to this encounter was dominated by Mohamed Salah’s announcement he would sign a fresh two-year contract. The opening quarter of an hour was dominated by Salah’s reinvigorated play. A fabulous pass that cut geometrically through the West Ham area to be finished off by Luis Diaz provided the Egyptian’s 45th goal involvement of the season – a record for a 38-game campaign.

There was one moment when Van Dijk sent over a crossfield ball that Salah intercepted just before the West Ham left-back, Ollie Scarles, who is 13 years his junior, and turned through 180 degrees as he did so. It was a moment to make you gasp, which is surely what sport is all about.

Thereafter, the gasps came from those with Cockney accents as the afternoon flattened out, and the question was not whether West Ham would be demolished, but whether they might actually seize the game, as Fulham had done last weekend. With more clinical finishing – they had two clear one-on-ones and struck the crossbar twice – they might have done so.

For only the second time this season Salah was substituted which was an odd finish to a frantic few days. He is a forward who dislikes being taken off and demands to play every game. As he ages, this might become the sort of problem that undermined relations between Alan Shearer and Sir Bobby Robson at Newcastle.

No sooner had he departed than West Ham equalised as Aaron Wan-Bissaka fought his way to the byline to send over a low cross that Andy Robertson put into his own net.

Salah is not a footballer who tends to finish a season strongly. His last goal had come against Manchester City, a club he excels against, in February and here he found Wan-Bissaka more awkward to play against once the teenaged Scarles had been taken off. By February, however, Salah’s work, and Liverpool’s had been largely done.

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