You don’t want to hear this, and I certainly don’t want to write it, but when you hit 30 it’s nearly over as an elite sportsman. Unless you play darts.
You may yet have plenty left in your career, but the body enters a gradual stage of physical decline and, with each passing year, your game needs to adapt to be able to offset that. Joints creak, legs slow, every knock you take hurts that little more.
In entirely unrelated news, Mo Salah will be 33 this year and has not only looked as good as ever but somehow has arguably been improving. Just something to think about the next time you make a straining noise getting in or out of a big chair.
Back to basics
After much pre-season discussion of “adaptation” and “managing minutes,” he’s not only proved decisive time and again, but seemingly broken a different record each week. Arne Slot’s system has helped, sure, but he’s also just a really special footballer.
What made the Slot transition smooth for Liverpool was its simplicity. Trent Alexander-Arnold felt like a right-back again, Cody Gakpo was again excelling on the left side, and Ryan Gravenberch actually got to play football.
For Salah, the brief was very simple – if you’re one of the world’s best players at driving at defences from wide areas, don’t get drawn nearer the middle when the game slows down.
Last season, he looked at odds with the more possession-focused style that Jurgen Klopp attempted to introduce. Always the widest in the attacking front five, his instinct to drive infield meant he often ran into spaces filled by defenders and teammates.
This term, the return to full-backs that actually play like full-backs has led to him occupying the inside-right position, with either Alexander-Arnold or Conor Bradley attacking the outside space he’s vacated.
Back On Top
A total of 18 Premier League goals last season wasn’t a dry spell, though it was Salah’s lowest tally since he joined the Reds. Putting the onus back on his direct running and attacking the penalty area resulted in him plundering 13 by the first week of December this time around.
His number of touches, passes, and carries into the final third have all been down, but his amount of carries into the box and successful take-on percentages have almost doubled.
Freed of his responsibilities in build-up and settled possession, he was told to stay as high and wide as possible, ready to drive into the chasms that creates, or at any defender foolish enough to attempt to sit on him (not literally).
But most telling was that he went from being one of the side’s frequent providers of “through-balls” to almost never playing them. He’d still laid on chances, just not from a position where players make runs ahead of him. That’s his job.
Back To The Future
This season, Salah recorded 10 goals and 10 assists in a mere 17 games across all competitions — the quickest he’d ever hit those figures. A goal contribution arrived every 67 minutes.
In the 3-3 draw against Newcastle, Salah broke Wayne Rooney’s record of providing both a goal and an assist in 36 different Premier League games — it took Rooney 491 matches, Salah 277.
He’s now fifth in Liverpool’s all-time list of scorers and, were he to surpass 30 goals in the league this term, would jump to fourth in the Premier League chart as well, above Thierry Henry, Frank Lampard, Sergio Aguero, and Andrew/Andy Cole.
There will, eventually, come a period when he’s no longer capable of flying past the best defenders in the world like they’re a set of training cones. But if this campaign has had him back at the peak of his powers, then that day could yet be a long, long way off. ​
