They also need time, possibly elsewhere. Doku arriving from Rennes to City isn’t comparable to Salah arriving to Liverpool from Italy. Mo has made steps from the time he joined Chelsea from Basel. Also, this is not Liverpool from 2016 or 2017.
Point remains, club moves on and there will be new players. Does that have to be a high scoring winger? No it doesn’t. Can a winger come here and get to those numbers by having better team mates and improve individually? Yeah, possible.
Are the chances higher that our next main goalscorer will probably be more of a central player than us finding someone like Salah who will come in and start banging 30-40 goals a season? Yes, they are. What Salah is doing is hard to find.
I don’t have any expectation that an elite professional athlete who knows full well that his club is speculating about whether or not his legs are aging too quickly to merit a long-term contract - and is definitely still producing - to stay mum about the whole process. Not many players with that kind of passive mentality become elite to begin with, quietly accepting limitations of any kind goes against the grain.
I don’t think FSG are necessarily wrong, we are hitting up against some brutal hard truths about aging and decline, but if Salah is going out on the pitch and giving it all, he is allowed to have some complexity in how he addresses the situation.
It might. We have form for unearthing good signings.
The other part is we don’t know how long Mo will be a world class game changer for. Will he still be that in 3 years time? I hope so, but there are legitimate question marks over how much he will decline and at what point.
It’s a dangerous game predicting what point in time his decline will set in, many people thought that was 12-18 months ago and he’s proving a lot of people wrong (yes, myself included before anyone gets twitchy). I think with someone like Mo, we just have to let him motor on and do what he does best. Right now 95% of the fanbase are desperate for him to stay…if the club ultimately decide to follow through and he ages 10 years overnight, goes horribly wrong etc, then it’s a decision which we’d all accept looking back as we were all on board with it.
That was a frustration penalty. It’s funny how Rudiger often gets under his skin, really knows how to play against him. Before the penalty, went for a mad dribble attempt just trying to bulldoze through a few opponents. Then hit it too hard. Luckily it didn’t cost us, our performance went up a level in the second half, there was a brilliant save from Kelleher and another goal to seal it.
Sounds like shite. ‘zero empathy’ ‘salah is sensitive and emotional’. Okay John Heitinga’s agent. Clearly you didn’t enjoy having to deal. If you are having to appeal to the players agent and be all sensitive etc then thats actually going to make it harder to negotiate. Glad to hear that Hughes isn’t a complete soft touch - many of these football agents are hopeless and just expect everyhting to be their way.
Just after the penalty miss Conor made a great inside run and was open, Mo ignored him and dribbled inside and lost possession, he let the miss affect his judgement
