Mo isn’t really the elephant in the room. By signing him for two years, we’ve preserved our ability to sell him next summer for what will likely be a significant fee.
thats the business side of the club and its a solid position we’ve put ourselves in…
however the footballing side is why i refered to him as the elephant in the room.
he seems undropable…any other footballer pulling in the performances hes been doing for quite a while now would be getting questioned, i can see why he stays on the park though with his track record and ability to do things from nothing…however, he doesnt seem to fit into a system that all the other players have been bought for and even when hes not playing well, other players get hooked…
hes the elephant in the room from that perspective, and if he goes to Afcon and we start clicking…that’ll be interesting
Trent needed replaced. Nunez was shite. Jota passed away. Diaz perhaps could have been kept against his wishes then left for free. Harvey wouldn’t have been the difference.
What would you have done?
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Come on. He’d lined up that move a long way in advance.
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The team isn’t well balanced at the moment, but I don’t see Salah as the sole (or primary) reason for that.
We’ve seen Salah have a spell like this before, I think it was the start of 23/24 (or the year before, can’t remember). If he is left isolated on the tight touchline he’s rubbish. That isn’t his game, he’s not a head down sprint merchant like Madueke who win plaudits by powering beyond people before kicking it out of play.
He needs to be involved in the danger zone. Get runners off him, give him the ball, and he does the rest. Against Everton and Atletico we saw what he can do. Currently, he’s barely seeing the ball in dangerous areas. Bournemouth is the only game I can think of in which he was genuinely wasteful, the others he just hasn’t had any service.
I’m struggling to understand how dropping Salah for Chiesa or (god forbid) Frimpong solves the issue. Are we suggesting a 442? If so, surely Mo could play off Isak/Ekitike.
I don’t disagree that we have been buying players with the idea of phasing Salah out, but we haven’t finished the job.
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Yes, we could have kept Diaz. Of course we could. But it would have gone against the whole ethos of what this club has built in credibility and reputation within the game.
He was on about 100k a week. He had offers at double that, and we didn’t want to match those offers.
What people seem to expect us to do was sit him down and say “You might have offers to double your wage elsewhere. But we’ve got two more years of you on your contract. So shut the fuck up, knuckle down and you can go in a couple of years on a free, by which time your legs might have gone and no-one is giving you the wage you could get now”.
Liverpool do not stand in player’s way if they want to move on. We have built a reputation for being sound, and we could have ended up in the mess Newcastle got into with Isak. That reputation for doing right by players can quickly evaporate if you are digging your heels in with a lad on strike.
I’m sure the clubs preferred stance would have been to keep him and let him go on a free, but that wasn’t going to happen as soon as Diaz got offers to put him on 200k for the next five years. We were never going to match that, so we had to let him go.
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Just on Salah:
Premier League site has him down as having just 6 touches in the oppo box per game so far this year.
Had a quick glance at some other seasons, all hovering around 9.5-10.
That would appear to confirm the eye test to me - he’s not receiving the ball in good positions often enough.
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Or it could also be he isn’t moving into those positions
Last year, the team often played through a Trent/Szobo/Salah triangle, which meant that Salah often got the ball in favorable positions on the wing.
It seems as though they’ve more evenly distributed the attack this year.
He was on 150k Paul Joyce has quoted this numerous times.
As for not standing in players way Suarez was told he had to stop.
Countinho was told he was stopping.
So this notion we let players go when they want isn’t true.
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Could be, but it isn’t. He hasn’t stopped wanting or forgotten how to influence games.
It’s systematic/tactical.
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Yeah, this has me a little surprised. I had assumed with his form last season, the sale of Diaz and the signing of Frimpong and Kerkez we would be playing Gakpo and Salah more narrowly as both are at their best in and around the box.
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Absolutely.
Like I’ve said before, we did do this under Klopp and Ljinders for a bit at the start of one season. Salah wide, Trent almost as a 10 from right back. Wild.
Anyway, it doesn’t work. Get Salah on the ball near the corner of the box. Somebody overlaps, somebody runs back post, couple others around him. He finds a pass or he scores. Seen it a thousand times already, it’s almost too obvious. Give him the ball on the touchline 40 yards from goal against a set defence and he’s toothless. Not his game.
He still has world class quality, we’re not using it.
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It doesn’t matter whether was on £100k or £150k. He wanted a lot more, guaranteed for the next five years, and he had that on the table elsewhere.
Suarez and Coutinho was a long time ago, but both had mitigating factors. The bid for Suarez was way below his value and the Coutinho bid was dropped a couple of days before the window closed. When I say we let players go, obviously so mean it has to work for us as well.
We spent a good chunk of the summer taking the piss out of Newcastle, and noting that their ‘he is fucking staying and that’s that’ would bite them on the arse later on.
But it hasn’t worked out well its left us short of wide players.
The comparison with Newcastle is mute too Diaz was nothing but professional went on tour was training and playing. If any the Guehi situation was more in tune with Diaz.
Not being a smartass, but in a genuine attempt to be helpful:
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Mute means to deaden, muffle or soften a sound, so makes no sense when used together with point.
So it has to be moot which is a discussion dealing with an imaginary legal case.
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Or anything subject to debate; arguable or unsettled.
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Has Cynicaloldgit reicarnated…
I think we all understood the context of the post.
I know, but it might be useful knowledge in the future. I was trying to be as respectful as possible.
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