Steven Gerrard couldn’t help but notice what Mo Salah was doing shortly after the final whistle in Liverpool’s 2-0 defeat to Paris Saint-Germain tonight.
The Egyptian was dropped to the bench for the first leg of the Champions League quarter-final at the Parc des Princes and, despite the Reds chasing the tie, wasn’t called upon by Arne Slot at any stage.
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Even though the 33-year-old’s form in recent weeks and months has come in for fierce criticism, it still seemed surprising that he wasn’t deployed for some portion of the game against PSG.
However, Gerrard was impressed with what he saw from Salah after the full-time whistle had blown and the stadium was almost empty.
Gerrard praises Salah mentality
Speaking on TNT Sports‘ match coverage, the ex-Liverpool captain observed of the winger: “Credit to him, he’s just stayed behind and done extra running.
“If there wasn’t a midweek game, Wednesday probably would be a big [training] session, so in his mind he’s already got his mind on Fulham and doing extra work, which shows the pro and the mentality we’re dealing with.”
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Salah will be chomping at the bit for a return to the starting XI
We all remember how Salah reacted to being left out of the starting line-up for three successive games at the start of December (and playing no part in two of those), and some people have been waiting for him to kick off in full view of the watching public tonight.
We don’t doubt that he’ll have been privately fuming at not getting on the pitch against PSG, but from what Gerrard noticed, it seems as though the Egyptian channeled any frustration into a positive action by undertaking extra running after the game, rather than throwing his toys out of the pram.
Having played no part in this match, there’s a strong chance that he’ll be restored to the starting XI against Fulham on Saturday, when a return to goalscoring form would be most welcome for a winger who’s netted only 10 times all season, by far his lowest output for a single campaign at Anfield.
Barring an improbable comeback next Tuesday night, Salah will have a maximum of eight more matches for Liverpool, and naturally we’ll all want to see as much of him as possible before his emotional departure from the club at the end of May.
Hopefully he’ll use his non-appearance tonight as motivation to excel against Fulham at the weekend and reignite the Reds’ pursuit of a top-five finish, which we now know will guarantee Champions League football for next term.
Such an idiotic statement from Gerrard who knows full well that this what all the subs go through not just Salah. There are so many reasons why I’d be horrified if he ever ended up as manager at Liverpool, his lack of basic knowledge of simple tactics is shocking. Slot clearly played 5 across the back for a reason tonight, yet somehow Gerrard seemed worried that we’d do the same in the second leg. Slot has never done this before and will pretty much never ever do this again. He has kept us in the tie (just), if we’d gone toe to toe with them we’ve have been hammered. So sad so see such a great player trot out such stupid statements.
We are not still in the tie, we couldn’t even get one shot on target. PSG already beat us at Anfield, with the current mentality of the team, do you think things will be any different.
Mate, we are not Bolton wanderers and the coach is not sam allardyce. We were the epl champions last season and we invested in players. Even if we cannot go heads on toe to toe with psg, we cannot be having a 0xg statistics with players like wirtz, ekitike and szoboslai. It’s the mindset and approach slot has instilled in our players. We no longer play to win. We play not to lose and last night, slot even said we were lucky not to have lost by a bigger margin. Have we downgraded the standards to we play to not lose by a big margin?