Mo finds even the world’s third best can get the hook
Salah is being upstaged by Hazard this season
IT REALLY was a sorry trudge. Head down, a handshake for the touchline elders and a quick retreat into his tracksuit and thoughts, the first of which may have been how the player regarded as the third-best in the world was hooked with 25 minutes still to play at 1-0 down.
And yet that is the way it seems to be going right now for Mo Salah.
It had all looked so easy last season. This one is all just that bit more laborious, a touch more like hard work, even if his appearances seem to be getting shorter.
Almost certainly that is all just the price of genius — there is nothing quite like a 44-goal season for raising bars, increasing expectations.
By those standards, three goals and one assist in seven games would, according to the thumbs of Twitter, pin this little Egyptian as anything from ‘bang average’ via ‘p*** poor’ to a ‘one-season wonder’.
It is woefully harsh, of course. Forgetting for a moment that Salah had four goals and one assist by this comparable stage in 2017-18, this is hardly the greatest collapse since Jim Furyk sent out his boys for the Friday foursomes.
It is more an exercise in fine margins, those slithers of space that enable distinctions between a podium place at that FIFA junket, and a player being a disgrace to his family, school, neighbours and local pet shop. The fact is, Salah is not far off. He is still the fulcrum of attacks, still the Liverpool player with t he sharpest movement, touches and vision. The difference is that each facet is just a little down on what it was.
Indeed, it is hard to make an argument for any game in this campaign when he has resembled fully that magnificent and revelatory force of nature from last season. West Ham at home? That was probably the best of his bunch. And he got the winner against Brighton.
But what were predominantly 8/10 performances in 2017-18 8 have drifted out to 7/10s this time. The prime difference would seem m to be that he isn’t finishing g every chance — that much was again apparent here.
Consider the opening 10 minutes. In the fifth, he took a touch on the edge of the Chelsea area, a fraction right of centre, and scuffed the shot directly to Kepa. The e plan was to set a course outside de the far post and let the bend bring ring it in. In the event, it started just ust off centre and bounced slowly to the keeper.
A moment later, he took aim from precisely the same spot. Less heel and more toe this time — off it went, a long way high and a long way wide. Chelsea fans enjoyed that one.
Again, small errors. That was the tale of his evening when it all might have been so different. What would
the reaction have been, f or example example, if his shot around the half-hour mark had not been clipped off the line by Antonio Rudiger? The touch around Kepa immediately beforehand was perfect, the shot from a wide angle was so close to making it.
It was a similar picture a short time earlier, when he took possession on the edge of the area and in the bustle spotted Roberto Firmino coming in from the other side, crossing the six- yard box. The reverse pass behind David Luiz was just the tiniest of fractions from a superb assist. Few players possess the imagination to make that pass.
Still, Salah’s night ended on 66 minutes and with it the social media chatter continues, for whatever that is worth.
It doesn’t help, of course, that major fixtures such as this one are so often characterised by the clashes of the Titans that they throw up. In this instance, that meant comparisons with Eden Hazard, a player who at his brilliant best hasn’t quite touched the levels Salah reached last season.
This time round, Hazard just might. He is that good and with a greater weight of numbers on his side he will make the argument easier. Maurizio Sarri is already shouting it from the hilltops — in a matter of weeks he has elevated Hazard to the best in Europe and then on to one of the best in the world at only ‘75 to 80 per cent of his potential’.
It is not an unreasonable claim. His goal here made it six in the league this season, to go with two assists.
Rather impressive in that is that those six goals have come from nine shots. It is the kind of effic i e ncy t hat Sal a h has f o und strangely hard to come by this season, and that might well have formed part of the Egyptian’s thinking on Liverpool’s bench last night.