It'll Do Until The Mess Gets Here

Mo Salah kicks Arne Slot when he's down.

It's not that Arne Slot wouldn't have been ruing Ryan Gravenberch ignoring the ball on Leeds's last corner that turned into the equalizer as it was. After Mo Salah decided to go all Hank Scorpio after the game, he probably was beside himself. If Gravenberch just heads the ball away, anywhere, Liverpool win, and there's little chance Salah sees the opening to nail himself to the cross. But that's a pretty strong symbol for where most of Liverpool's plans have gone this season.

I'm not going to rehash the whole thing, you've almost certainly seen at least the gist by now. Does Salah have a beef? A very little one, and certainly nowhere near enough to justify trying to make the club, his teammates, and the fans choose between him or the manager. That might work if he's 27. He's not. That might work at Real Madrid, where Vinicius Junior is just about to get Xabi Alonso fired. It won't work at Liverpool.

Salah can think that his previous eight seasons buy him all the rope he wants to stay in the lineup. What that ignores is that Salah's rep kept him in the lineup as long as it did to begin with. Anyone else plays like Salah did for the first six to eight weeks of this season gets dropped in October, not December. Salah was started again and again, and continued to be utter pants.

Part of Liverpool's problems this season has been being caught between still trying to run the entire attack through Salah, and starting to shift it to run through Florian Wirtz in the middle. But so much of what they still do is about getting the ball to an isolated Salah against his fullback. Countless times this season, that has involved him literally running straight into said fullback like Wile E. Coyote into a wall painted with a tunnel. He just has not been very good.

Salah may look at a few others who haven't been dropped this week and wonder, and he'd have a point. He's not going to care that Joe Gomez starting twice in three days at right-back meant he couldn't replace Ibrahima Konate at centerback on Saturday. All Salah is going to see is that Konate once again lit his own and the team's face on fire by giving away a penalty for no reason when Leeds were creating nothing. You can sort of see why that might chap Salah's ass. Salah is watching Cody Gakpo do a whole lot of not much but start all three games. Alexis Mac Allister becomes a stationary obelisk in midfield that opponents run by to see how hard he'll spin in their wake, but he appears in all three games, too. It's not all that hard to see Salah's angle.

But that angle would require Salah to think that he's above all of this, which he hasn't been this season. It's also such a quick escalation. It is one week of inactivity for him out of eight seasons, basically. He certainly could have no complaints about being dropped in the first place. He would have to understand not changing a winning team the next game, given just how difficult Liverpool have found stringing any kind of adequacy together. Maybe a third-straight benching comes as a shock and an insult...but it's also just one game. And that's worth pulling out Rick Dalton's flame-thrower over?

This is hardly the first time Salah has gone to the press to serve his own purposes. In fact, he only goes to the press to serve his own purposes. Two different contract extensions have seen him play on fans' paranoia to pressure the club into giving into his contracf demands. He spoke out when Jurgen Klopp similarly dropped him for a game or two in 2023. These are always calculated.

This one's different. This isn't just a player trying to secure his own future. This is sensing an opening and trying to create a rift in a club that would take years to heal. No club, other than Madrid really, can choose one player or even two or three players over a manager and the club itself. If it did, which player would be next to try it? It also smacks of a player who doesn't think he's had any hand in the team's struggles, which is just myopic.

In the end, it doesn't have to be as big of a deal as it seems right now, no matter how it plays out. His teammates got the sense this was coming, and they already lived through his bellyaching-through-the-press before he signed his extension last season. This is a familiar song. He goes off to the African Cup Of Nations next week, so he won't even be around for a month. He also gave them something to rally around, if they're all still aligned behind Slot (and they may not be).

It really wouldn't be that strange to see things calm down while he's gone, the heat goes out of it all, and he can just return at the end of January with a "I was just frustrated because I wasn't playing and we weren't winning, etc." interview. Especially if Liverpool could find any form in the interim.

It also wouldn't be the huge bomb if he doesn't play for them again that most would think it would be. There's always been a little buzz that Liverpool signed him to a two-year extension with the intention of selling him to Saudi Arabia after the first season, because they would still get a pretty inflated price for him given what he would mean to the Saudi league, despite his age and only having a year to go on his deal. Whether that's true or not, only they will know. But if that was the plan, him fucking off in January only brings it forward by a few months and Liverpool would have already had their plan in place for what comes after.

It would be a shitty way to end his simply glorious and barely believable time at Anfield. What would really be sad about it is that he would have done it all to himself. The club and manager always ended up giving him the money he wanted, the status he wanted. They let him try and play his way out of his funk. They keep trying to bend the attack around him, even when it's obvious they'd like him to merely be a cog in it going forward. And he still tried to blow it up. It's just so unnecessary.