Arne Slot has been accused of treating one Liverpool player with ‘utter contempt’ in an article which was scathing of the Reds’ head coach.
Mo Salah was dropped to the bench against Paris Saint-Germain on Wednesday night, having endured a dismal outing in the FA Cup defeat to Manchester City last weekend, but he wasn’t deployed at the Parc des Princes despite his team being 2-0 down from the 65th minute onwards.
The Dutch tactician attributed the winger’s non-appearance to LFC being in survival mode against a PSG side who’d been threatening to run riot and to conserving his energy for the upcoming Premier League clash against Fulham on Saturday.
However, in an article for The Mirror, John Cross believes that Slot’s decision not to call upon the Egyptian last night was a personal one as he lambasted the head coach’s treatment of the 33-year-old.
He wrote: ‘To describe Slot’s decision making as strange would be an understatement. It smacks of the fact Slot has not forgiven Salah for throwing him under the bus earlier this season.
‘With crass but blissful ignorance, all Slot is achieving is undermining his own position as manager, which is hard to believe, considering how thin the ice is that he is now walking on.
‘Salah deserves much more appreciation than this, but instead he is now the most high-profile victim of Slot’s utter contempt, and the overriding feeling from a neutral point of view is one of great sadness.
‘Salah sprinkled stardust on English football. He helped make Liverpool great again – and did so with an attitude other footballers should aspire to replicate – but he now finds himself cast aside like a piece of rubbish Slot doesn’t want littering up the place.’
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It’s difficult not to think that the relationship between the pair never recovered from the winger publicly declaring after the 3-3 draw at Leeds in December that he felt ‘thrown under the bus’, having been omitted from the starting XI for three matches in a row that week.
Slot reintegrated him into the fold quite quickly after that tirade, albeit that Salah’s presence at the Africa Cup of Nations offered a timely distraction from the storm which had been brewing on Merseyside but subsided once he returned from the tournament a month later.
Whilst the head coach’s authority should be absolute, and the winger has undoubtedly had a dreadfully underwhelming season by his standards, it’s sad to think that his final few weeks at Liverpool may well peter out to a tepid anti-climax.
The Egyptian will most certainly be afforded a glorious send-off at Anfield after the final game of the Premier League campaign on 24 May, but it seems unclear how many more opportunities he’ll get before then to add to his incredible tally of 255 goals for the club.
Whereas Salah’s legendary status at LFC has long since been cemeneted, Slot’s chances of being held in equally high esteem have sadly disappeared throughout this train wreck of a season, and the goodwill from last season’s top-flight title triumph has well and truly evaporated.
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