Superb Salah Sparkles In The Deep

A Paean to a Player Reborn

Life is a series of ups and downs. So are games of football, it seems; from one extreme to the other.

Life is also a series of cycles and phases. Everything has a limited shelf life, including us.

In this reborn Liverpool team there's a new player emerging from the shape of the old.

I've been critical of aspects of Mo Salah's game in the past 18 months – particularly taking too many shots from the predictable cutting-inside move, that then lack power and/or accuracy (often tamely tapping it to the keeper), to go with something he cannot do anything to reverse, and that's the apparent decline in half a yard of pace.

(Also, full-backs are getting quicker too, and are often much younger these days; in response to the evolution of the fast inverted winger. Gone are the 'solid oak' type full-backs who were often centre-backs, albeit Newcastle still have a bit of that about them in Dan Burn.)

But Salah's vision and creativity has never looked better.

He's still a goal threat, but but the days of the big tallies could be behind him. Indeed, as I'll go on to discuss, his Goal Creating Actions figure (goals and assists per 90) has never been higher. And the underlying numbers accurately match these goal-related outcomes.

For a man who became obsessed with goals, it may help him – in what may be his final year with the club (and I definitely wouldn't sell midseason) – to now obsess about chances created and expected assists.

(Actual assists are great, but also rely on the randomness of someone else's finishing, and the vagaries of being discounted by things like Harvey Elliott's shot deemed an own goal, which removes the assist. Same piece of play by Salah, but no longer counted as an actual assist, albeit still there as an expected assist. That said, that value would be relatively low given the distance of the shot, but it was still a good bit of creative play, to lay the pass into Elliott's path.)

Salah currently looks like a genuine creative genius, by finding space and weighting perfect passes, rather than sprinting past full-backs.

His game in changing, as the team evolves. Having expected him to try and make the move to Saudi, I want to take this chance to analyse his new game and sing his praises in more depth.

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