Mo Salah has offered an honest and insightful description of what’s happened to Liverpool this season.
The Reds were top of the table after we battered Crystal Palace 7-0 at Selhurst Park before Christmas, but since then, we’ve had the odd nice victory and disappointment after disappointment.
None of it has been the Egyptian King’s fault, of course. He has 29 goals in total and has carried us in 2021, while his attacking team-mates, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane, have floundered.
Diogo Jota has not been able to rediscover his early season form since returning from injury, either.
If their finishing had been like Mo’s (and Salah’s hasn’t been perfect, by the way) we’d almost definitely still be in the top four – and maybe the Champions League semi-finals – too.
“Well, I don’t want to give any excuses but I think we started the season really well and then we had a few injuries and we also struggled to win some games,” he said, cited in KingFut.
“But it’s part of the game. I don’t want to put my finger on some points – we could do better but this is part of the game. We were unlucky, so let’s finish the season in the best possible way and then think about winning the Premier League next season again.
“I think maybe because the game after Crystal Palace we started drawing and losing some points and maybe some players lost some confidence in scoring goals or something. But I don’t mean anything bad about my teammates, I am just saying that maybe this could be part of the reason.
“But I think it is part of the game: you miss a chance and you just need to carry on and keep going forward for the next chance [and] to have that mindset that you’re going to score, you’re going to score, you’re going to score, it will come anyway. But I think in some games we go to the game with some pressure that we must win now and I think this affects us in the game.
“I think that’s what happened because we started the season really well and everybody was saying we were going to win the Premier League again, and since we started to drop points you start to feel the pressure more… you feel ‘now we’re going to lose it, we’re going to lose the Premier League’ and the pressure comes higher and higher.