Liverpool v City... the Salah-KDB showdown for Player of the Year
WHEN you’re a striker in a rich vein of form you cannot wait to get out on to the pitch.
Ninety-minute matches feel like 10-minute kickabouts and you just don’t want them to end.
You’re hot, it’s a simple as that, and there are few better feelings in the world.
It’s something I’ve spoken about with Gary Lineker, Sadio Mane and even the great Pele on my TV show of late and we’re all agreed that, as strikers, you like to bank goals up.
When you’re doing that you’re in a mindset that you can just feel normal about your game.
You don’t feel cocky or overconfident, you just feel you can go out and make your runs, get into the box, and if you do that you know you’re going to score. There’s no pressure. When you haven’t scored in three or four games, however, your thought processes change.
Suddenly it’s all about, ‘I have to score today so it doesn’t become four, five, or six games’, and you find yourself snatching at, and wasting, chances.
So, I’m sorry to disappoint fans here, but all strikers are really doing for themselves when the goals are flying in is keeping their own personal wolves from the door.
There’s a certain confidence when you’re popping them in, of course, but what you’re really doing is giving yourself some breathing space to just keep doing your job.
That’s how Mo Salah will be feeling every time he walks on to a football pitch at the moment.
He was brilliant again on Saturday when he put Watford to the sword, with his four goals a magnificent effort.
It’s quite right that more and more people are beginning to wonder if he will pip Kevin De Bruyne to the individual awards when they are dished out at the end of the season.
Salah is certainly coming up fast on the rails as we approach the final furlong but, for the time being, I still have KDB ahead by a nostril – and a small one at that. The Belgian has been spectacular from day one and far and away the most consistently good player in the Premier League week in, week out this season. But the fact that Salah is playing so consistently well and creating and scoring goals in the numbers he is doing means there’s now very little to choose between the pair. If the Liverpool striker continues to score at his current rate between now and the end of the season then he is going to be touching the kind of goal numbers achieved by Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. That’s no mean feat anywhere in the world, but especially in the Premier League. What it will come down to now for me is the Champions League quarterfinal between Liverpool and Manchester City. Which one of them can be the difference over the two legs? And whoever does get through, can they lead their team to Champions League glory? There’s no reason why either of those two teams can’t go all the way. And if Salah’s side do that then we could just see him pipping De Bruyne at the post.
The choice comes down to who will be the difference in the Champions League