Even when the light is starting to go out and the muscle memories are starting to play tricks, the true greats can still pull everything together from time to time.
And that is how it was at Anfield last Wednesday night when Mohamed Salah carried the ball laterally across the top of the penalty area, briefly sent it on loan to Florian Wirtz before taking it back and delivering a beautiful left foot shot in a perfect arc across the Galatasaray goalkeeper and in to the top corner of the net at the Kop End.
That was true Salah. Prototype Salah. Perfect Salah. The Salah I will remember when he moves on at the end of this season. Mo Salah, the greatest Liverpool forward to have played for the club.
That’s quite a statement. It’s one that will immediately be questioned by those who would lobby for Ian Rush, Roger Hunt, Kenny Dalglish, Fernando Torres, Robbie Fowler, Michael Owen and Luis Suarez. Liverpool have been lucky down the years haven’t they?
But it’s a conclusion I finally reached after watching Salah score an unfathomably brilliant goal against Manchester City in October 2021.
It was one of those slalom runs in from the right touchline, one where the only person in the whole of the L4 postcode who had any clue where the ball was going was the squat bloke with it glued to his feet. By the time it was in the back of the net, sky blue bodies lay scattered behind him like fallen trees.
Mohamed Salah produced a trademark finish as Liverpool beat Galatasaray on March 18
Salah announced on Tuesday he will leave Liverpool at the end of the season as a free agent
I saw him do it once to Tottenham, too. Once again late in the game. At the same end with the same result. In every conceivable way, Salah’s timing was always impeccable.
Salah was perhaps at his peak back then, playing for arguably the best side Anfield had ever seen. Another bold claim. But he was breathtaking at that time and so, for a golden three or four years, were they.
Salah, for a while, was as close to unstoppable as it gets, a footballer blessed with astonishing technical gifts that were allied to an often under-appreciated physicality and a fighter’s instinct so raw that to lose the football before he was truly ready was simply offensive to him.
His decline this season has been startling. In terms of consistency and confidence, the magic would appear to have left him. It happens. Meanwhile, his words spoken in spite about his manager Arne Slot at Elland Road back at the start of winter reflected terribly on him.
But all this tells us is that he simply stayed for a season too long. Strange, after all the fuss of last year, that we sit here now perhaps wishing that, for everybody’s sake, he had taken the Saudi riches twelve months earlier.
None of this remotely tarnishes the legacy of a true icon. If football in its rawest form is about joy and expression and freedom and instinct then for the best part of nine years this remarkable trailblazing North African footballer has been the embodiment of football’s true soul.
Anfield has always loved real genius and perhaps the great Dalglish is the closest to ever come to what Salah delivered. The Scot won much more and managed the club. He somehow guided Liverpool through the aftermath of Hillsborough and remains wedded to the city.
There were perhaps some similarities in the way the two men played the game. Salah was quicker and more direct but both had a natural understanding of time and space and geometry that cannot be taught and an ability to see big pictures and anticipate a pattern unfolding half a second before everybody else.
The great Kenny Dalglish is the closest to ever come to what Salah delivered for Liverpool
Ian Rush is on my list. Of course he is. A supreme finisher and a forward who pressed from the front back in the 1980s when it was probably called something else.
I didn’t see Roger Hunt but his numbers speak for himself while I did see the remarkable Suarez, a footballer of quite extraordinary gifts who would have earned a place in any of the great Liverpool teams down the years. Meanwhile only a lack of longevity counts against stellar finishers Fowler and Owen.
But peak Salah was something else. At his best when in tandem with Sadio Mane and Roberto Firmino and supported from further back by Trent Alexander-Arnold, Salah was a the true poster boy for Jurgen Klopp’s years of Blitzkreig football.
Alexander-Arnold said on a podcast last year that Klopp’s Liverpool were actually most dangerous when the opposition had the ball in their half simply because the moment they lost it they would be left at the mercy of the red tide.
Salah was the rip curl in all of that, a swirling current of dancing feet and speed that would turn defenders into spectators.
Sometimes, I willed him to pass the ball more. Over time, he did. Great players evolve and Salah grew to understand that. He wasn’t always a perfect team-mate but right until the very end he has earned the right to occasionally be indulged as all the great attacking players are.
Ian Rush (left) and Roger Hunt are two club legends who rank highly in my best Reds forwards
He will not leave without regrets. Two Premier League titles – one won in the Covid days of darkness – are scant reward for all he gave. Runners-up finishes with 97 points in 2019 and 92 points in 2022 feel scarcely believable now and speak only of the majesty of Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City.
Champions League finals lost to Real Madrid in 2018 and 2022 saw Salah denied first by the elbow of Sergio Ramos and then the brilliance of Thibaut Courtois. Sport is often not very fair and Salah will leave Anfield with some lasting bruises to accompany his incredible stats.
Dalglish won six League titles and three European Cups. Rush’s numbers stand at five and two. But football doesn’t live in our hearts and minds in such a binary fashion. It’s so much more visceral than that.
If football is largely about how it makes you feel – if it’s about thrill and awe and wonder – then Salah delivered that with such certain grace and apparent ease that it’s hard to imagine there ever being another quite like him. We may not quite understand truly what we had until he is gone.
