Mohamed Salah’s Egypt Goals Could Provide Liverpool Boost

Liverpool FC haven’t experienced the most enjoyable start to the 2022/23 season. They have won just two of their opening five Premier League games and have endured poor results against local rivals Manchester United and Everton.

Star player Mohamed Salah managed a goal in the opening game of the season—a nevertheless disappointing 2-2 draw against Fulham—and scored in the 2-1 defeat to United at Old Trafford, which gives him a return of two goals in six games.

Though it’s early days, and six games is only a small sample to go off, his goal return is around half its usual levels for Liverpool.

In terms of goals per 90 minutes in the Premier League, Salah usually comes in around the 0.60 mark, though last season it was up to 0.75 and in his first season at Liverpool he averaged one goal per 90 minutes in the league.

This season Salah is at 0.33 goals per 90’—way below his usual levels. But this isn’t all down to him, and he’s far from the worst player in the team as Liverpool as a collective have suffered a poor start to the season.

International breaks are often bemoaned by club managers as they put extra workload on players and disrupt their schedule in terms of these extra games and travelling to and from them.

Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp will have been happy to see Salah score twice for Egypt in their friendly game against Niger.

Egypt are currently looking to rebuild under new head coach Rui Vitória after missing out on this winter’s World Cup in Qatar, and the new boss stated the importance of having Salah in their ranks for this gathering and games against Niger and Liberia.

“Our main target from the first camp is to achieve harmony between the technical staff and players,” Vitória said ahead of these friendlies.

“I also want to monitor players closely, as playing with the national team is totally different from the club level.”

Salah’s first goal against Niger saw him receive the ball in a central position in front of the defence, taking out his marker with a nice bit of movement to let the ball run across his body before knocking it beyond him.

He then finished as we’ve seen many times before, before tucking a penalty away with aplomb later in the game.

It will have been encouraging for Klopp to see Salah show such deftness of touch and quickness of mind. And he might have been even more pleased to see Vitória give Salah the Liberia game off.

Egypt released a statement saying: “The technical staff of the Egyptian national team preferred to rest Mohamed Salah and Mostafa Mohamed for the Liberia friendly after both took part in the previous match against Niger.”

Salah now returns to Liverpool hoping to help them turn their season around, but he’ll need help. Just as the slump hasn’t been solely down to him, the recovery will need to be a team effort, too.

A player of Salah’s status will want to win trophies, not just challenge for them, and not being at the World Cup will mean he hopes to be on the global stage in club football in 2023, ideally via Liverpool success in the Champions League.

This recent brace for Egypt could be just the boost he needed to help find his goalscoring touch, and help Liverpool emerge from this international break in a more positive frame of mind before the break for the World Cup later this year.