Close Menu
    Football

    Mohamed Salah has just showed Liverpool the true reason a new contract is non-negotiable

    adminBy No Comments4 Mins Read

    Mohamed Salah touched the ball just 23 times during Liverpool 1-2 Newcastle in the Carabao Cup final. The Egyptian was nullified but showed why a new deal is a must.

    With Liverpool now having been knocked out of the Champions League and the domestic cups, and the Premier League title being not far off confirmed, there is going to need to be news before long on the futures of Virgil van Dijk, Mohamed Salah and Trent Alexander-Arnold. It can’t be delayed for much longer.

    Each can make their own case for why they are the most vital to extend terms with, but there has been no movement on any front in the midst of continuous negotiations. But this week, Liverpool got a preview of what things might look like – in a manner — if that continues beyond the summer. Alexander-Arnold was missed at Wembley, and Salah has been suddenly stifled.

    Tino Livramento did an excellent job defending against the Egyptian as Newcastle United won the Carabao Cup, but Salah just did not enter the game. For the second successive match, he was unable to offer a spark out of nowhere — and no one else stepped up to bail him out.

    Luis Diaz (13 goals this season) has never been very prolific, while Diogo Jota (eight) and Darwin Nunez (seven) have combined for only 15 goals this year. Cody Gakpo has a solid 16 goals, but they pale in comparison to Salah, who has scored 51% of Liverpool’s goals this season.

    Salah’s contributions are not limited to scoring. This season, he has 32 goals and 22 assists in all competitions and has developed into a more versatile attacker than ever before. The Liverpool attack is based around him, and rightfully so.

    For example, without Salah’s late heroics at St Mary’s this season, Liverpool would have lost at least two points to lowly Southampton. Most of the time, the Egyptian has been the one to step up when it counts, even if it means taking a penalty.

    It’s futile to calculate Liverpool’s Premier League position without Salah’s goals and assists because no team can play a whole season with only ten players. However, it is not an exaggeration to argue that if Salah had gone last summer, Arne Slot would not have won the league title on his first attempt.

    All of that is reason enough to tie the 32-year-old down to a new contract, which is still yet to be sorted out with the clock ticking louder and louder. But there is an even bigger factor that has to be considered: the fact that Salah is so far ahead of his club peers when it comes to impact in front of goal.
    Suggesting that the matches with PSG and Newcastle are further evidence that he should get a new contract might sound strange, but in fact, without him firing, Liverpool scored once in the 210 minutes of its last two games. If this is what life looks like without Salah — the evidence of the season as a whole far outweighing the last few days in terms of his true value — then Liverpool simply cannot countenance it.
    In the Premier League, for instance, Salah has 27 goals — three times the next player on the list (Diaz, with nine). No other Liverpool player has hit double figures yet.
    It is already a non-negotiable that Liverpool signs a new number nine when the season comes to a close and there is a strong case growing for adding another forward alongside them too. Even then, though, the Reds cannot afford to lose such a big proportion of their goals from this season with Salah almost a one-man attack at times.
    Identifying reliable goal threats for reasonable sums of money and who won’t cost the earth in wages is hard enough. Doing that on top of replacing Salah would be impossible. The current impasse can only end one way.
    Share.

    Related Posts

    Leave A Reply