Liverpool reporter shares when he first noticed ‘evident’ signs of ‘frustration’ from Mo Salah
It was on Saturday night that Mo Salah dropped an explosive interview regarding his discontent at Liverpool, but his frustrations have apparently been boiling under the surface for weeks.
By now we all know the main bullet points from what the Egyptian said after the 3-3 draw against Leeds – “It seems like the club has thrown me under the bus”; “I had a good relationship with the manager and all of a sudden, we don’t have any relationship”; “someone doesn’t want me in the club”; “I don’t know what is going to happen now”.
As James Pearce reported on Monday morning, teammates and senior figures at LFC had a sense of the 33-year-old’s unhappiness prior to the match at Elland Road, but were taken aback by how strongly he hit out at Arne Slot and certain individuals at Anfield.
Salah ‘frustration’ was seemingly ‘evident’ since October
As he digested the fallout from what happened on Saturday night in an article for Mail Sport, Lewis Steele claimed that Salah had first cut a frustrated figure as far back as the 5-1 thrashing of Eintracht Frankfurt in October, when he only came on for the final quarter-hour.
The reporter wrote: ‘The signs of Salah’s frustration were evident for some time, in hindsight. His body language made him seem grumpy in Frankfurt six weeks ago when he did not start. But he responded with goals against Brentford and Aston Villa in the following week and it was forgotten.’
Salah seemingly unhappy for weeks before explosive tirade
Between the 3-2 defeat to the Bees on 25 October and the 4-1 thrashing by PSV Eindhoven a fortnight ago (inclusive), Salah was ever-present in all six Liverpool matches for which he was selected – he and many other senior players weren’t in the squad for the Carabao Cup loss to Crystal Palace.
In three games since then, he’s played just 45 minutes and hasn’t started, which’d appear to suggest that matters with Slot may have come to a head between the PSV debacle and the 2-0 win at West Ham four days later.
We’ve seen in the past that the Egyptian has been visibly annoyed when not starting – think back to his touchline exchange with Jurgen Klopp at the London Stadium in April 2024 – but never before has he lashed out publicly at fellow LFC employees like this.
The school of thought that Salah’s teammates knew of his growing anger prior to Saturday night was fuelled by a leaked video clip on social media which appears to show Virgil van Dijk imploring officials or members of the press to ‘let him say something’ prior to the bombshell tirade.
Many Liverpool fans may already have taken sides – some will show unwavering loyalty towards the winger for everything he’s done at the club; others will be scorned at his public undermining of Slot in a season when the player has fallen well short of his usual world-class standards.
Either way, it’s regrettable in the extreme that matters have come to a head like this at a time when the Reds were already facing a hugely difficult task in facing Inter Milan away in a crunch Champions League fixture.
Some way, somehow, the situation needs to be dealt with in an affirmative manner at the earliest opportunity so that the toxicity doesn’t intensify even further than it already has.
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