Liverpool Running Out of Wriggle Room and Salah’s Struggles Are Not Helping

Liverpool, Britain - May 13, 2018 Liverpool's Mohamed Salah REUTERS/Phil Noble
Liverpool, Britain - May 13, 2018 Liverpool's Mohamed Salah REUTERS/Phil Noble
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Liverpool Running Out of Wriggle Room and Salah’s Struggles Are Not Helping

Liverpool, Britain - May 13, 2018 Liverpool's Mohamed Salah REUTERS/Phil Noble
Liverpool, Britain - May 13, 2018 Liverpool's Mohamed Salah REUTERS/Phil Noble

Form is a very fragile thing. Last autumn Mohamed Salah was playing perhaps as well as he ever had. His goal at Chelsea on 2 January was his 23rd in the Premier League and Champions League combined. Since when he has scored just 10 times, only seven of them from open play. It’s true that on Saturday he nearly won the Merseyside derby late on, his shot coming back off Jordan Pickford’s near post, but for him this was another disappointing afternoon. In isolation, perhaps, it wouldn’t draw the attention, but the pattern is clear.

It’s not just Salah. Liverpool as a whole have been short of their familiar level. None of Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Jordan Henderson and Fabinho have been anywhere near their best. Van Dijk especially, a player who for a time had seemed almost invincible, impossible to dribble past, seems not to have recovered from the chasing Aleksandar Mitrovic gave him on the opening Saturday of the season, and could easily have been sent off against Everton for his foul on Amadou Onana.

Context, as ever, is required. This may be Liverpool’s worst start to a Premier League campaign under Jürgen Klopp, but they have still lost only once, and they did win the Community Shield. They are the joint-second highest scorers in the division (although ideally you wouldn’t be bundling 60% of those goals into one game against Bournemouth). They have still lost only three times this year – one of those a second leg when they still advanced, and another the Champions League final. If this is a crisis, it’s the sort of crisis most clubs would dream of.

But recent history suggests that title winners achieve a points total in the mid-90s. How many points can you afford to drop? 15? 18? 20? Liverpool have already dropped nine – having played only one of the Big Six. It may be that Manchester City’s abandonment of their desire for order opens things up, and it may be that there is a greater element of randomness in this most congested of seasons, but Liverpool are running out of wriggle room.

Yet Liverpool have had the better xG in five of their six games so far. They’re only a couple of goals off the sort of start, say, Tottenham have had, where the sense is they’re not at their best but have been picking up points anyway. Modern football is too complex, too interconnected, to say that is the fault of the forward line but it is a problem an in-form Salah might immediately mitigate.

So what has gone wrong? Perhaps Liverpool as a whole are suffering a hangover from May. With a week of last season to go they were, after all, still in with a chance of an unprecedented Quadruple. The celebratory parade after defeat in the Champions League final seemed a conscious attempt to cut through the sense of disappointment, to remind everybody just how extraordinary last season was, even if it resulted in only the two domestic cups, but that perhaps wasn’t enough. It may be that fatigue – emotional as much as physical or mental, although after seven years of Klopp, there may also be some of that – has just dulled the edges.

But Salah had two additional disappointments at the beginning of the year, losing on penalties to Senegal in both the Cup of Nations final and a World Cup qualifying play-off. The game against Chelsea was his last before a five-week break for the Cup of Nations and he hasn’t really been the same since (which is, of course, why Premier League managers hate the tournament coming mid-season; it’s not just that they lose the player for the month of the tournament, it’s the potential knock-on effect afterwards).

Egypt under Carlos Queiroz played a style of football that could hardly be more different from Liverpool’s. They sat deep, spoiled and looked to grind out results. Salah, whose celebrity status places him under almost unimaginable pressure when he plays for his country, is often confined to chasing lost causes, isolated on the right trying to pinch a throw-in or a free-kick, which is probably not the best use of his gifts. He scored only two goals in seven appearances in Cameroon, operating by the end in a fug of barely concealed frustration that has only rarely lifted since.

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When he got back to Liverpool, Luis Díaz had arrived. The Colombian settled remarkably quickly, but his inclusion meant Sadio Mané moving into the center. Mané thrived, but his natural game was not to drop deep as Roberto Firmino or Diogo Jota would, and that meant the space was not being created for Salah to attack from wide. The signing of Darwin Núñez is not going to change that – an issue Salah referred to last week. He has had to modify his approach, and almost certainly won’t get into as many goalscoring positions as he does with Firmino or Jota; his shots per game are down to 2.83 this season as opposed to 3.90 before he went to the Cup of Nations last season.

That’s not to say that the new-look forward line cannot work, merely that the adjustment is taking time and that, coupled with problems elsewhere in the team, is dragging Liverpool below the exceptional levels that have become normal under Klopp. Salah, right now, is not the player of a year ago, and Liverpool are not the team of a year ago.



Motorcycling-Double Dakar Winner Sunderland Chasing Round the World Record

Rallying - Dakar Rally - Prologue - Alula to Alula - Alula, Saudi Arabia - January 5, 2024 Red Bull GASGAS Factory's Sam Sunderland in action during the prologue stage REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed/File Photo
Rallying - Dakar Rally - Prologue - Alula to Alula - Alula, Saudi Arabia - January 5, 2024 Red Bull GASGAS Factory's Sam Sunderland in action during the prologue stage REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed/File Photo
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Motorcycling-Double Dakar Winner Sunderland Chasing Round the World Record

Rallying - Dakar Rally - Prologue - Alula to Alula - Alula, Saudi Arabia - January 5, 2024 Red Bull GASGAS Factory's Sam Sunderland in action during the prologue stage REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed/File Photo
Rallying - Dakar Rally - Prologue - Alula to Alula - Alula, Saudi Arabia - January 5, 2024 Red Bull GASGAS Factory's Sam Sunderland in action during the prologue stage REUTERS/Hamad I Mohammed/File Photo

Double Dakar Rally motorcycle champion Sam Sunderland is gearing up to ride around the world in 19 days, a record bid that the Briton expects to be mentally more challenging than anything he has done before.

The bid, launched on Thursday, targets a record of 19 days, eight hours and 25 minutes set in 2002 by Kevin and Julia Sanders for the fastest circumnavigation of the globe by motorcycle.

To beat the feat, which is no longer recognised by Guinness World Records because of the dangers involved, the 36-year-old will have to ride 1,000 miles every day and on public roads across Europe, Türkiye and into the Middle East, Reuters reported.

A flight will take him on to the Australian outback, New Zealand and the Americas. From there, he and the Triumph Tiger 1200 go to Morocco and loop back through Europe to Britain.

What could possibly go wrong?

"I don't think you can ride around the world and cover that many miles a day without having a few hiccups along the way," Sunderland told Reuters with a grin.

"When I try and compare it to the Dakar it's going to be probably, in some sense, tougher. Not physically but mentally.

"In the Dakar you've got a heap of adrenaline, you're super focused, things are changing quite often which makes you have to react. And this is like: 'Right, those are your miles for the day, get them done'. It's more like a mental fatigue."

 

ONE DIRECTION

 

The target time excludes ocean crossings but the journey, starting in September, must go one way around the world and start and finish at the same location on the same machine.

Two antipodal points must be reached on a journey through more than 15 countries and 13 time zones. The Dakar rally covers 5,000 miles over two weeks.

"I was trying to put it into perspective for my mum the other day, and my mum lives in Poole in the south of England, and I was like 'Mum, it's like you driving up to Scotland and perhaps halfway back every day for 19 days'," said Sunderland.

"I'm on the bike for around 17 hours (a day). I set off at 5 a.m. and arrive around 10, 11 p.m. most nights. So definitely later into the day you feel that sort of mental fatigue setting in, and to stay focused and stimulated is not that easy.

"But at least I don't have dunes and mountains to deal with and other riders in the dust, and hopefully not getting lost either."

"I need to behave, let's say, I need to follow the rules of the road and be a good boy with it," said Sunderland, who announced his retirement from professional racing last year.

Sunderland will have a support crew of six travelling behind by car, for security and assistance, but the Red Bull-backed rider expects to be well ahead.

He also hopes his bid will have a positive effect.

"In the news today, it's all sort of doom and gloom in the world, with all the wars going on," he said. "And I think it's quite nice to show people that you can still get out there and experience the world for what it really is."