For 86 minutes, Liverpool did not have a good evening against PSG on Wednesday.
Despite managing to keep the French champions out up to that point, the Reds were so far below their best as to be almost unrecognisable.
No player fitted this description quite like Mohamed Salah, who was completely anonymous for Liverpool.
It wasn’t even that Salah was quiet, the Egyptian continually made wrong decisions when on the ball and in good attacking areas. It was not like him at all.
As a result, it was not a great surprise to see Arne Slot decide to take Salah off with just a few minutes of the 90 left to play. His race looked run.
In his place came Harvey Elliott, who scored the winner just moments later. And as Slot looked back on Elliott’s clinching goal in his Friday press conference, he made a point to mention Salah’s reaction to being taken off.
Photo by Ibrahim Ezzat/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Photo by Ibrahim Ezzat/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Arne Slot clears up Mohamed Salah reaction
Being substituted in a big Champions League knockout game is not something Salah is used to at all.
The 32-year-old usually stay on the pitch right up until the final whistle, no matter how he is playing on the night.
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And according to Slot, Salah showed his dissatisfaction when his number went up on Wednesday. However, the Liverpool head coach was keen to stress that there was no issue at all with Mo.
“I don’t think Mo was happy that I took him off five minutes before the end if I looked at his body language!” Slot smiled.
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“And there’s a reason for that because he is a player who can score a goal for us even if he’s not playing his best game. That’s why I hardly take him off, now I did.
“To be clear, that is not a headline that Mo was frustrated,” he added. “I could see that he would have preferred me not to take him off but his behaviour was completely normal, he shook hands.
“He just probably thought, ‘maybe there’s one more chance to come and I will score that one’ and to be fair to him he always does that. People now say it was a good substitution because Harvey scores but if I ask him [Salah], I’m sure he would tell me if I was there I would have scored it as well! It was a completely normal reaction.”
Will Salah start against Southampton
Given that Liverpool have three big games coming up in the space of eight days, there is a feeling that Slot will rotate a little for Saturday’s clash against Southampton.
However, continuing in his press conference, the Dutchman suggested that he will try and keep the changes to a minimum.
“If, if I make the choice to play other players that is because I think that’s the biggest chance to win tomorrow and not because I want to rest them for the game against Paris Saint Germain,” Slot insisted.
“The only way I make a change is maybe because it’s only two days in between and I might feel that playing someone else is a better option because we have many players who are of equal quality.
“But that only has to do with us having a bigger chance of winning the game against Southampton rather than having anything to do with the Paris Saint Germain game.”
In terms of Salah, Liverpool have a better chance of winning any match at all with him on the pitch. There’s surely no chance of a rest for Mo on Saturday.