Timing is everything for a goal scorer and from Mo Salah this couldn’t be worse. As such, it absolutely stinks.
Standing in the rain by a team bus – as his manager and team-mates come to terms with another dismal afternoon – Salah decided to do what no truly great footballer should ever do. He piled on some misery of his own. He put his own need’s first. How desperately selfish and self-defeating. How depressing.
In the space of a handful of short but premeditated and deliberately impactful sentences he has brought more pain, stress and misery to the door of his manager Arne Slot and brought his own Anfield legacy in to question in the process.
Just an hour after the whistle had blown on Liverpool’s 3-3 draw at Leeds, Salah accused Slot of throwing him ‘under the bus’ and spoke of having ‘no relationship’ with his manager.
The second part of that may be true. Who knows? It happens in football.
As for the first part, Salah has merely been taken out of team, that’s all. Thrown under the bus? With Salah in the team, this has been a bus running on three wheels. Something had to give and it did.
This stuff happens to even the best players and Salah should feel fortunate that it’s taken until the last three games for it to happen. The truth is that he’s been trading on reputation, status and hope since his utterly dismal performance in last spring’s Carabao Cup final defeat to Newcastle.
Salah – the Kop’s Egyptian King – is perhaps the best forward player ever to wear Liverpool red. But great players don’t behave like this. Great players see bigger pictures and understand that the team comes first. It’s always been that way at Liverpool down the years. Not in Salah’s mind, it seems.
If he is unhappy, that’s okay. But there is a way to deal with problems with a manager and this is not it. If he had such a poor relationship with Slot as the two men won a Premier League title together last season then why sign a new contract after all that speculation and prevarication? Maybe £400,000-a-week had something to do with it.
But maybe we should have known. Salah has, after all, broken ranks before. It was after a game at Southampton almost exactly a year ago when he told reporters he was ‘more out than in’ when it came to the matter of staying or leaving Anfield. That day it was his decision to talk to reporters. He approached them in a manner he never had before. It was exactly the same here in Leeds. Salah had clearly decided that – with the January transfer window almost upon us – it was time to put his own wants and needs ahead of everybody else’s.
What his team-mates will make of it is not hard to work out. Liverpool have been desperately poor this season and struggled once again here in Yorkshire. But there was no lack of effort at Elland Road. The likes of Virgil van Dijk, Dominik Szoboszlai and Ibrahima Konate looked utterly spent at the end of this game. While they were giving their all on the field, Salah sat in his big coat working out how to deliver what amounts to a letter bomb with his manager’s name on the front of it.
Slot is in a world of trouble at Liverpool right now. Last season’s Premier League title will only protect the Dutchman for so long. The vast majority of his squad are doing their best to pull him out of the cart. How utterly dreadful that his star player has chosen this moment to dump a bucket of manure all over the top of him.
