All those goals, all those records, all those Salah-framed moments that lifted Liverpool higher, torched beneath the stands at Elland Road. If these are to be the last days of Mohamed Salah in the Premier League, this is what people will remember, the full diva dump on Arne Slot.
It is impossible to see how both can survive. Indeed, that is the point. Salah has gone all in, playing the Egyptian King card, bringing the brand power of eight cosmic years down upon Slot’s head. He is now asking Liverpool’s owners to decide, Salah or Slot? And all it took was three games on the bench.
There is more to it than that, of course. Salah’s strop is just the latest development in an operatic unravelling that has managed to knock the Manchester United soap off its car-crash perch. Ultimately this is the consequence of flawed thinking by the Fenway moneyballers who tripped over their own conceit, the belief that everything reduces to a numbers game.
Well, the volcanic Salah has exploded dynamite under that, emptying his outraged soul all over the transfer calculations made in the summer. Slot worked closely with Richard Hughes and his data bots to completely recast the Liverpool forward line, so the blame rests as much with him.
In his first season at Anfield there were no significant incomings to assimilate. The team picked itself. He hardly had a decision to make other than to finesse a template laid down by Jurgen Klopp. You might argue he won the Premier League at the first attempt without really understanding how.
His managerial input would only be required when he and the fabled technical department flooded the squad with a raft of new talent, and not any old prospects, but two additions that smashed the Premier League transfer record, plus the highest regarded kid in France.
Where did Slot think Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike were going to play? Something had to give after spending £300m on a new front-three. That the mighty Mo might be sacrificed was unimaginable when Liverpool were celebrating a 20th Premier League title in July to achieve parity with United.
“This means more” was more than a cliche churned by the Liverpool marketing department. For the hardboiled Kopite it was affirmation, restoration, an indelible memory to add to the grand sweep of what came before at one of the world’s great clubs.
And the name shouted louder than all others was Salah’s, rendered unforgettable in song, a tribute that had the walls of Liverpool Olympia shaking when Jamie Webster picked up his guitar at an event to mark Klopp’s departure and sang: “Mo Salah! Mo Salah! Mo Salah! Running down the wing. Mo Salah la-la-la la-ahh, The Egyptian King!”
I have no affiliation to Liverpool FC. Indeed, had they known which club has my heart, they might not have let me through the door, yet even I was moved by the atmosphere in that hall, the love invested in a magical player synonymous with the club, the city. Salah is Liverpool, and they him, up there with Shankly, Dalglish and Stevie G.
He is also 33 years old. Ageing legs do not get quicker, reactions do not speed up. Those electric inputs that took him clear of his jailers are no longer his to command it seems. The energy appears not quite what it was. Hughes and Co gambled on Salah’s apparent fitness, Egypt’s most celebrated six-pack, with a new contract believing the Mo batteries to be indefatigable.
A little bit less of Salah might not be so bad were Slot not having to bed in Wirtz and Isak, not to mention Ekitike. That dynamic, melding old with new, has destroyed Liverpool’s rhythm. Cody Gakpo, who looks as potent as any up top, has been messed about and perhaps even more perplexing, Dominik Szoboszlai, the team’s talismanic midfielder, has sometimes been stuck at right-back.
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If it works, Slot is a genius. If it doesn’t, he’s an idiot. After blowing a two-goal lead at Leeds to draw 3-3, the equaliser coming in the fifth minute of added time, the arrow is pointing only one way. Though Liverpool sit just two points off the Champions League places in a season of widespread disruption, Slot has won only two of 10 in the league, losing six.
That is the telemetry of doom. Dropping Salah, a move widely debated and advocated, looked like the wise play. It might have been had the right wing been Slot’s only stress point.
Renewal is the biggest test of any manager in charge of a successful team. This is not the Eredivisie, and the threat to his survival is not only from without but within. Salah has played a lethal card, killing the Klopp vibe and maybe his own.
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