Be known as a great... and not a diver, Mo
COLLY
THE tragedy surrounding Emiliano Sala is hard to take in and my heart goes out to his family, friends and former team-mates.
I’m sure the boys he never got to join at Cardiff will want to pay him the ultimate respect, with the sort of performances that will give their fans – and Sala’s family – a tiny chink of positivity in a dire situation.
IF Mauricio
Pochettino leads
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absence of HeungDele Alli, the duty
international min Son on
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be the then he has to manager of the
season. THERE are very good reasons Sir Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush, Ian St John, Roger Hunt and their peers are superlegends at Liverpool. Why they are revered on the Kop for the things they achieved as footballers three, four, five and six decades ago.
It is because they won trophies playing a wonderful brand of football and without losi ng s i ght of sportsmanship at the same time.
Not only did they not lose sight of their values, but they actively promoted them as well.
And those values, with the style and the substance of the football they produced, are an integral part of the foundations upon which the modern Liverpool is built.
When I moved to Anfield from Nottingham Forest in 1995, I massively felt the weight of carrying those traditions on my shoulders.
At Forest, you’d hear all the tales of Brian Clough and I remember picking up bookings for things and wondering what he’d have made of the reasons for them – even though he was no longer there. When I got to Liverpool, we had Ronnie Moran, the guy who famously threw the Tesco bag full of winners’ medals on to the changing-room floor and said: “Right, pick them up, they don’t mean anything any more, see you next year.”
They were men who not only wanted to win, but demanded it was done in the right way.
I mention all this because t hese values still mean something to the generation I call proper football fans.
And it’s why I – and so many others – are getting frustrated with Mo Salah’s antics.
He showed us last season what a wonderful footballer he is – without using the dark arts.
Mentality
And, while this time he is wowing us again, another side has crept into his game.
He has started going down far too easily, looking for penalties – most notably against Newcastle and Crystal Palace – and it does take something away from his performances.
Few things in football would give me greater pleasure than seeing my old club finally lift the Premier League title.
But I want it to be because of the brilliance of Salah, Sadio Mane, Bobby Firmino, Virgil van Dijk or Allison – not because one of them won a few penalties that ultimately made the difference.
These days a very different mentality pervades our game and I’m not sure the younger generation really cares in the same way that many people of my age and above still do.
Diving seems to be accepted by those who’ve grown up seeing it happen in Under-10s, Under-12s and even adult football, and it really shouldn’t be.
I’ve often mentioned the time Robbie Fowler refused a penalty against Arsenal, telling the ref that David Seaman hadn’t touched him, and he won a UEFA Fair Play award on the back of that.
He didn’t need to do it, but he did, I think, because he felt the burden of what it was to be a Liverpool player.
And sometimes winning such an award is more important to certain sections of the fans – probably the older ones, to be fair – than it is walking away with the knowledge your star striker took a tumble to win the game and said, “Happy days, we got away with that”.
Now, I know some Liverpool fans will say: “Oh, come on, Collymore, don’t be all holier than thou.”
And I don’t expect Jurgen Klopp to pull Salah to one side and tell him to stop diving.
Modern managers look at these situations and think they’ll get unfairly punished if they tell their players to stay on their feet because they know some of the others won’t be doing it.
That’s a real shame and I hope that Salah gets the message – as Didier Drogba did at Chelsea – that we’d rather see him doing what he does best by staying on his feet than trying to con his way to glory.