MO SALAH is a fantastic player. He’s two goals away from 250 for Liverpool, which is phenomenal.
But we are entering that phase with him now where the conversation, rightly or wrongly, will be: Is the time coming soon for him to be moved on?
It is just like when people were questioning Steven Gerrard and whether he was getting too old.
That’s Gerrard, arguably the greatest Reds player of all time.
Salah’s legacy is cemented. If he never played another game for the Kop, he’s a legend, an icon, up there with how Gerrard is remembered.
But now his selfish tendencies are coming to the forefront more than ever. He remains a goal-first sort of player, not team-first, and that could become a big problem in this new-look Liverpool set-up.
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People will say that’s harsh — to be a goalscorer you have to be selfish.
But towards the back end of last year and rolling into this one, his performances haven’t been good enough.
From a team perspective, what I am seeing Arne Slot trying to do, he wants to build in a way where everybody has opportunities to score.
It’s not just going down the right where Salah and Trent Alexander- Arnold would always link up in the past. We’re moving away from that.
That will be a major adjustment for Mo, as well as being benched, like he was in their 5-1 Champions League win at Eintracht Frankfurt on Wednesday night.
I was in the stands watching it. There was a moment right at the end when he is thrown on and he gets put through on the angle.
He can square it to Florian Wirtz to get his first goal for Liverpool and no one would be talking about his £100million price tag or his tough start to life in England.
And what happens? Mo shoots and misses. Wirtz doesn’t react.
What those moments will do in the dressing room is the other players go, ‘Oh, you’re still worrying about you’.
When you’re selfish and you score and we win, it’s fine. When you are selfish, you don’t score and we don’t win, now it’s a problem.
Think the media are fickle? Dressing rooms are just as bad.
There’s a load of jealousy, frustration and envy. There are now a lot of big-money egos in this Liverpool team. That wasn’t the case last year.
A player that gets hammered by his team-mates, he will now be turning around and saying, ‘Yeah, but what about Salah?’
Others will be thinking in front of Slot, ‘Are you going to carry on playing him? Am I the man now?’
It is not about whether he is willing to change his game to adapt to a new style and prolong his career — like Gerrard did — but whether he is good enough, or has enough time to do it.
Last season, they allowed him the rope in terms of not tracking back and staying higher up because he was scoring goals and winning games.
I’m not saying he’s now got to go racing back and track down every player and every ball, but when you’re in poor moments, you’ve got to be able to show to your team-mates that you can dig in and help out.
I just don’t know whether at 33 you’re going to be willing to do that when you’re so used to being the man and so used to having people basically carry the heavy load for you.
When he is on it, Mo is still frightening, and he will still have more than enough games of being on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he scored against Brentford tomorrow.
And he will absolutely thrive in this period now where everyone is questioning whether he is still good enough, or at the levels that he was before.
It will give him a new source of motivation, especially for a player who has won the lot.
The questions are coming — getting dropped to the bench in Frankfurt, he will be angry and desperate to turn it on and shut everyone up.
We’ve all been there as older pros, you still think you can do it.
You are hanging on because you know there’s less time ahead of you than there was behind you and you’re slowly falling off, even if it’s half a per cent.
What’s crazy is he signed a new deal in April.
It’s now October and we’re questioning whether he’s the same person. It’s mental — but it’s the business we are in.
Things change very quickly.
Opinions change very quickly, as does the perception of a player.
I love football but I hate how we do that within weeks.
Salah can still be the guy — but he’s not used to having competition for his place, especially when you see Hugo Ekitike’s finish at Frankfurt.
He looked like a prime Thierry Henry, never looked like missing.
This is where Slot’s man-management will come into it, and a big test of how he copes with a star man that is no longer doing it to the levels he was.
Benching Salah sent a message to the rest.
No one is safe and no one should now be stepping out of line, or else.
And yet, if Slot benches Salah against Brentford and they lose, what happens then?
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I’M confident Sean Dyche will do a good job at Nottingham Forest, but I just don’t know how good this group of players are.
Nuno Espirito Santo did brilliantly last term, but that was the outlier, overperforming in all the data and XG and shocking everyone by earning a European spot.
They’ve been struggling and fighting relegation either side of that, so what are the expectations? Survival and a good European run? Dyche can provide that.
But I was mortified to see Morgan Gibbs-White and Chris Wood at the NFL getting interviewed just days after Ange Postecoglou was sacked.
You can go to the game, but why are you doing interviews? Would a good group do that? This year, they’ve stunk the place out.
There are some good eggs in there, but some not so nice ones too.
It is a tougher job than people will think, but Dyche will know that.
And even if Dyche goes in and organises them, makes them solid and they’ve winning games, he still won’t get the credit he deserves because fans will just claim he is copying Nuno’s style.
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And if he doesn’t do well, then they will claim it was never the right appointment.
It feels a bit lose-lose, but having that connection with the club from years back, hopefully he gets the love he deserves.
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