Not that he will feel he needed it, but the manner of Liverpool’s hard-earned victory at Inter Milan vindicated Arne Slot’s decision to drop Mohamed Salah in the first place.
In each of the five defeats from six league games that preceded Salah being jettisoned from the starting XI, every opponent focused a much higher percentage of their attacks down the Egyptian’s flank. They were safe in the knowledge that with his running and defensive stats falling off a cliff this term, they had an easy avenue to target an increasingly vulnerable back line.
Salah admitted such last season. His defensive responsibilities had been reduced, on the premise that the goals and assists didn’t subside. Taking penalties out of it, six goals in his previous 33 appearances shows the 33-year-old didn’t keep up his end of the bargain.
As the grounded exile flexed his muscles to an otherwise empty mirror back in a Kirkby gym, Liverpool stumbled to the kind of victory in the famous San Siro where nobody negated their defensive requirements.
High intensity it was not. This was walking on the treadmill without any incline. Yet, through the largest slice of luck, Liverpool battled to the only kind of win a team so down in the doldrums could muster: dull, dogged and defensively determined.
Their long-coveted record signing Alexander Isak, brought in to carry Salah’s goalscoring mantle, continues to look a shadow of the player Liverpool so desperately chased.
One particular effort midway through the second half in Milan summed it up. The Newcastle version of the Swede would have pirouetted around like a ballerina, but here Isak made a simple swivel look cumbersome. The shot that followed was an even tougher watch, as he ballooned his effort well wide.
This is a striker at his lowest ebb in terms of confidence. It is now 641 minutes with one goal in the Premier League and Champions League. A low output can be forgiven early into switch to a new environment. What is more concerning is that Isak is struggling to have any effect at all.
Against an Inter side far from firing on all cylinders, Isak and Hugo Ekitike did not complete one pass to one another in the entire match. Over £200m worth of strikers who cannot even find each other from a few yards away.
It was no wonder Liverpool needed the largest slice of fortune – a rather dubious, last-gasp penalty – to secure a vital victory that puts them on course for an automatic qualification spot for the Champions League knockouts.
Slot’s previous attempts to shoehorn all of his expensively assembled strike force into the same team had left Liverpool looking porous in the extreme. You cannot play four forwards if one of those wide attackers assumes he does not have to run back.
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The midfield diamond deployed in Milan was the antithesis of that gung-ho approach. Exactly what a team on its knees needed to start to get back on its feet.
If some form of reconciliation is found, a different incarnation of the Egyptian King must present itself – or another unconscionable run of consecutive defeats, all as a result of goals leaked down one side, would again be in the offing.
The old Isak could also do with making an reappearance before he too falls foul of a manager not afraid to make the toughest of decisions.
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