It is not inevitable Salah will leave Liverpool – he has good reason to stay
Egyptian has made big impact at Anfield, but that does not mean Real, Barcelona or PSG will lure him away
In football, we hate the thing we love. The megastar-driven, sovereign wealth-funded transfer mania that sends top players spinning to Real Madrid, Barcelona or Paris St-germain as news rockets is gaudily entertaining until our club is on the wrong end of it. Then it feels relentless and obscene.
And few clubs are on the wrong end of it as frequently as Liverpool, who have already pre-empted the predictable where-will-mo-salahend-up saga by declaring: here, where he works, under contract, in a side with a bright future.
This briefing coincided with the first big wave of speculation about Salah being the obvious target for Europe’s wealthiest and most prestigious clubs, who have already lifted Javier Mascherano, Xabi Alonso, Luis Suarez and Philippe Coutinho from Anfield. Liverpool fans will, justifiably, rage against the premise that Salah’s flight from Merseyside is a historical inevitability, nine months into his Liverpool career, as if Barcelona and Real Madrid were the moon controlling the tide.
Who wants to live in a world like that? Not me. The true cost is that every time Salah goes jinking through a Premier League defence to plant the ball in the net, we resume a tortured debate about where that brilliant goal might take him next.
Nothing is guaranteed to kill the pleasure of watching him play like the idea that his presence in a Liverpool shirt is temporary. No self-respecting club can be lumbered daily with the background noise that this or that star is merely passing through. No set of fans should be expected to accept that a brilliant striker in his first season at their club is bound to leave simply because Real and Barca start sending mind waves through the transfer universe.
Liverpool’s supporters had their fill of this with Coutinho, whose departure for £142million has not diminished Jurgen Klopp’s squad. Roberto Firmino, part of the side’s goalscoring trident, thinks it may even have improved the team by removing the “playmaker” and shifting the emphasis to speed and thrust. A haul of 73 Premier League goals hardly points to emasculation.
Salah, though, is a different matter. Signed as a goalscoring winger, he has emerged as a prolific central striker who bamboozles defenders with his elusive running. The loose comparisons with Lionel Messi stem from his unpredictability – his skill in tight spaces. He is not quite in Messi’s class, of course (no one is), but those qualities raise players to a higher level of buy-ability. Certainly higher than Coutinho, an artistic player but not the kind of killer Salah has become.
The Premier League has “found” Salah twice and lost him once, when Chelsea moved him on to Roma. To lose him twice would be worse than careless. To assuage that fear, we could tell ourselves to imagine a world in which Liverpool’s potential Footballer of the Year wanted to stay right where he was, even if a big house in Formby recorded a lot fewer sunshine hours than its equivalent on Catalonia’s coast.
Assuming any financial offer could be matched – and why could it not, with the Coutinho money still in the bank? – and Liverpool displayed “ambition” in next summer’s markets, a case could be made for Salah declining the chance to play second-fiddle to Cristiano Ronaldo at Real Madrid or Messi at Barcelona. There is no other type of fiddle to play at those clubs, until one or both retire. As for PSG, a quick call to Neymar would dissuade him from joining a global branding operation that has made no headway in the Champions League.
To be part of a revival, as Salah may be at Liverpool, must have some currency in football, unless those factors have been crushed for ever by the gravitational pull of Spain’s top two clubs, which has assumed an almost mystical quality – in part because a handful of super agents have become disgracefully powerful traffickers of top talent.
Observing all this, the mind occasionally wanders to Kenny Dalglish, and how his arrival at Anfield in 1977, would, by today’s standards, have set off a weekly cabaret about when he was going to leave. In his era, Dalglish would have graced any club in Europe. The comparison is imperfect, because he was winning European Cups in great Liverpool sides who were the masters of England. But remembering those days at least breathes life into the hope that Liverpool will one day be allowed to build their teams without the “inevitability” of their best players being removed.
We need to reject this assumption that what Real and Barcelona want, Real and Barcelona get. That cynicism has consumed us. Of course, it falls to Liverpool to give Salah reasons to stay. Knocking Manchester City out of the Champions League would be a start. So would buying well this summer. Salah has a stage that illuminates his talent and a manager who believes in building his team. He is appreciated in England in a way that he might not be in the megastar-heavy Spanish league.
Even if this turns out to be doomed romanticism, let’s at least fight our corner.
If England are “40 per cent” fitter than when Eddie Jones took over, as he said they were before the Scotland game, then last year’s Six Nations champions are suddenly
40 per cent more knackered, with Lions-related fatigue cited as one of the reasons for three successive defeats.
There is no disputing that English rugby’s club and international calendar is absurdly arduous, especially given the sacrifices made on last summer’s Lions tour – where the series draw was largely attributable to the physical commitment made by Warren Gatland’s squad.
The phrase doing the rounds is that England were “out on their feet” by the end. Against Ireland on Saturday, that looked correct, but it was less so at Murrayfield against Scotland, where the implosion started. The temptation is to ask whether England looked spent against Ireland because they were tactically and psychologically demoralised, or because they had been working too hard on the training pitch, to attain that
40 per cent raised fitness.
With limited access to players, international rugby coaches walk a fine line between ‘intensity’ in build-up work and ‘beasting’ teams – ie over-training them.
If this happened with England, a less punishing preparation is an option.
Sometimes less is more.
He has a stage that illuminates his talent and a manager who believes in building his team England are no longer fit for purpose