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Mohamed Salah will leave Liverpool at the end of this season as one of the greatest players in the club’s history (some will argue the greatest) although he may well leave with a lingering sense that he could – and probably should – have achieved much more on Merseyside.
This weekend represented another such missed opportunity to make a significant contribution to Liverpool’s trophy quest, yet on the big occasion, Salah came up short, as the Reds were trounced 4-0 by old foe Manchester City.
Of course, there’s been focus on his missed penalty, but the missed chances earlier in the game — when Liverpool were still with hope — proved more costly.
It may sound like a harsh criticism for a player who has delivered goals — both quantity and quality — trophies and unforgettable memories for the Merseyside giants, and Salah is, without doubt, one of the most consistent forwards in Premier League history.
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However, while football tips its hat to the accumulation of goals and the consistency of finishing, is it not those decisive contributions in the defining matches — the finals, the title deciders, the crunch knockout games — upon which the greatest legacies are built?
It’s a fair question to ask of Salah, after nine years on Merseyside: has he truly owned the biggest occasions often enough?
Soon after his arrival at Anfield, Salah shifted from being purely their main goalscorer to their reference point in the biggest games.
He scored in each round of the Champions League en route to the final in 2018 — including in both legs of the semifinal against Manchester City — and the Reds’ prospects against Real Madrid in Kyiv ultimately pivoted on his shoulder injury, sustained at the hands of Sergio Ramos, after half an hour.
Without him, and with Lorius Karius appearing on a one-man mission to torpedo their European Cup hopes, Liverpool fell to a limp 3-1 defeat.
Liverpool and Egypt striker Mohamed Salah reacts with disappointment to missing a penalty against Manchester City. James Gill – Danehouse/Getty Images
Less than a year from his arrival, expectation had swollen dramatically, scrutiny had intensified, and Salah was increasingly being turned to in the biggest moments.
It’s not that he hasn’t scored against the biggest teams, despite accusations of being a flat-track bully. His 16 goals against Manchester United over the years, 14 against Tottenham Hotspur, 10 against Arsenal are testament to that.
However, his record in finals with Liverpool doesn’t make for particularly encouraging reading. Since arriving at Anfield, Liverpool have been in nine finals, with Salah scoring only twice — both penalties — against Spurs in the 2019 Champions League final, and against City in the Charity Shield three years later.
He failed to score in one and a half other UCL finals — both losing efforts against Real — both of the cup final penalty-shootout victories against Chelsea in 2022, both 2019 victories in the UEFA Super Cup and the FIFA Club World Cup, as well as last year’s EFL Cup final defeat by Newcastle United.
In those 2019 finals, someone else stepped up; in the pair of finals in 2022, Liverpool prevailed against Chelsea on penalties, with Salah not scoring once from open play across any of the nine different finals with Liverpool during this period.
It’s not a record limited to the Reds either, with Salah failing to net in either of Egypt’s Africa Cup of Nations final appearances during his career – in 2017 and 2021.
So, 11 finals, two penalties, zero goals from open play.
Didier Drogba, another of the great African players to star in the Premier League, never had anything like Salah’s week in, week out consistency in front of goal, but the Ivory Coast great was a force of nature in the biggest of matches.
He scored in four separate FA Cup finals (a record), three League Cup finals (a record), and bagged the late equaliser and penalty winner for Chelsea in the 2012 Champions League final. Whereas Salah too often shrinks in the biggest fixtures, Drogba rose to the sharpest spotlight.
Chelsea striker Didier Drogba, draped in an Ivory Coast flag, celebrates the Champions League final victory over Bayern Munich in 2012. Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC via Getty Images
Salah’s struggled too to replicate the form in the business end of the Champions League. In 2017-18, he scored five in the knockout stages, in the subsequent years, he’s never scored more than three.
Since the 20-21 season, he’s scored five knockout goals in the UCL in total, the same as he did in the that maiden Champions League campaign. Should more have been expected from the Reds’ talisman during these years?
Liverpool’s rivalry with City — the latest chapter of which was written this weekend — has defined the modern Premier League era, with the battles between Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola breathing new life at the summit of the world’s greatest league.
Matches between the pair have often pitted the top teams in the land against each other, and often contained title, or silverware, implications.
Salah’s record against City, despite scoring 13 goals over the years, has arguably felt slightly underwhelming relative to his overall brilliance.
Admittedly, he’s not the player he once was, but this weekend, Liverpool needed leadership, composure, a cutting edge.
They’re all things that Salah – despite his decline – should be able to offer, yet he was an all-too familiar shadow of his former self. Remember Paris Saint-Germain last season, remember Newcastle?
He was peripheral, drifting in and out of the contest, unable to impose himself, unable to change the course of a bout as it started to drift away from his team.
The missed penalty, pawed away by James Trafford, was the nadir, but his missed chances earlier on prevented Liverpool from asserting themselves in a contest that ultimately got away from them.
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An early effort was blocked by Abdukodir Khusanov after he met Giorgi Mamardashvili’s upfield ball on the left-hand side, before Salah later missed the target entirely when he really should have done better.
The out-of-sorts great and his beleaguered teammates could only watch on impotently as Erling Haaland scored three and City ran out 4-0 winners, romping into the FA Cup semis in the process and heaping further pressure on Arne Slot.
When it mattered most, when the true greats would have stepped up and dragged their team through, Salah wilted, faded, and retreated.
Perhaps it’s the nature of his qualities that he doesn’t have a ‘Plan B’ to influence games like some of the other icons of the sport.
Lionel Messi could drift inside, Zinedine Zidane could calm games down, or intensify them depending on the rhythm required, Cristiano Ronaldo’s mere presence transformed decisive matches with his opportunism, movement, timing.
Diego Maradona, Andres Iniesta, Luka Modric, Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer…they all raised their levels when the stakes were heightened, found extra capacity and deeper resolve when a fixture began to pull away from their team.
Others, Paul Scholes, Francesco Totti, Dennis Bergkamp, Roberto Baggio were able to compensate on declining physical attributes and reduced mobility later in their career by leading into their elite technical ability to shape, dictate, define contests in ways that ensured they were relevant and dangerous later in their career.
Salah doesn’t have this, and as the years have ticked on, he’s adorned fewer and fewer high-profile clashes.
Did Salah’s failure to consistently impact the bigger matches also count against him in the Ballon d’Or voting? Perhaps last season, where his outstanding PL campaign could have led to a more prominent ranking than fourth had he coupled it with some decisive performances in the latter stages of the UCL.
Salah won’t have too many more opportunities to truly shape a genuinely big match for Liverpool before he departs for pastures new in two months’ time; they still have some decisive games ahead of them domestically to qualify for next season’s Champions League, while the rematch against PSG looms large.
Of course, they’ll remember the things he won, the goals he scored, the memories… although quietly, the man himself may reflect on the silverware he left behind, and a record in the biggest games that keeps him a tier beneath the game’s GOATs.
