BRING ON THE BARCA!
Man of the Mo-ment is too hot for Porto in the Dragon Stadium as Liverpool set up a massive showdown with Messi in the semis
WE hardly needed a Time Magazine front cover to know Mo Salah is a man of influence.
Yet his recognition as one of their 100 most influential people could not have been more timely, given his emphatic return to the sort of form that made him a world star.
Here, in the Estadio do Dragao, the mythical home of a fire-breathing dragon, he scorched poor Porto, by creating one goal and scoring another to put Liverpool into the Champions League semifinal with ultimately much to spare. In doing so, the Egyptian King wrote another little bit of Reds history, with the goal that killed the tie stone dead in the second half, making him Liverpool’s second-highest scorer in this competition behind Steven Gerrard.
He was outstanding, completing a fine move from the Reds on 65 minutes after brilliant passes from sub Firmino and Trent AlexanderArnold to stroke home.
Even a Porto goal, when Eder Militao smashed home a fine header, couldn’t dampen Liverpool spirits on a sodden evening... because Salah had turned provider to crucially destroy Porto resolve.
It was the cruellest of goals, fittingly delivered in excruciating fashion. Liverpool had barely escaped their own half in the opening 26 minutes, under siege from a salvo of shots by the home side – 14 to one the count was.
But this is football. There is no justice. Just ice in the veins of the clinical teams who will pick off opponents and make them pay for any weakness in front of goal.
Porto had their moments, they had chances from the first minute when Jesus Corona cut in and flashed a shot over the bar. Unfortunately for the Portuguese, most of their moments fell to Moussa Marega, their villain from the first leg, the striker who fluffed three fine opportunities to steal a priceless away goal.
Here he fluffed and flounced again three more times.
Liverpool needed no further invitation. For the first time they found steal in their approach play, with Andy Robertson and Salah combining on the left before Gini Wijnaldum kept the move going by steering back to Salah.
His cross to the far post was radar guided, and Sadio Mane swooped to turn the ball home, but even as he did, the flag went up, and most in the stadium thought it looked offside.
After a ridiculous wait
check a simple offside – we got our first clue when Salah started celebrating, telling Mane to do likewise.
He’d stolen a sneaky look at seemingly the only screen in this huge stadium, the one pitch-side, and saw instantly what the video officials took agonisingly longer to decide. Mane was onside. Goal stood. Game over.
The life was sucked out of valiant Porto in an instant, VAR itself took the energy from Porto for the rest of the half. This is where the system needs sorting, it needs speeding up dramatically... which is what you could have said about Liverpool up to that point. But maybe they were simply playing the ultimately canny game, duping and drawing the home side on, before delivering the sucker punch.
They found time to score two more goals in the last 15 minutes, as Joe Gomez came from the bench for his first appearance in four months after injury, and Roberto Firmino buried a free header.
Virgil van Dijk headed a fourth six minutes from time.
It was another small chapter in Liverpool’s glorious European history, to deliver a much bigger one against Barcelona later this month. On this form they will relish it.