Liverpool’s Klopp era successes have relied on their Egyptian star and the club must decide how much they want to keep him
There were 76 minutes gone at Anfield as Mohamed Salah took a pass from Curtis Jones near the right touchline. Three blue shirts loomed close by. Salah was facing the crowd. Shortly before Manchester City had levelled the score at 1-1, and could claim, on the metrics, to have dominated the game to that point: more shots, passes, crosses and dribbles, albeit without seeming to have any preferred method of actually putting the ball in the Liverpool goal.
Through all of that there was a familiar sense of one player in red operating under a different gravity. Salah does this. Shane Warne famously damned Monty Panesar with the comment that he hadn’t played 33 Test Matches, but the same Test 33 times. The same could be said of Salah, who has effectively played the same game for Liverpool 212 times. Except happily, in Salah’s case, it is an astonishingly good game.