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With the increasing demands of today’s players, and the game played at a faster pace than ever, it is unusual for someone to show up at every game, week after week.
That’s why Virgil van Dijk made headlines by becoming the fifth outfield player to play every minute of a Premier League title-winning campaign when Liverpool lifted the trophy last season.
For fast attackers, who depend on their pace and movement to thrive, it’s even rarer to play every week. Yet that is what Mohamed Salah has done for Liverpool for the last three years or so. There were only four league games last season in which he did not participate, and he was on the bench for three of them.
And surprisingly that was his worst comeback for league appearances of his career at Liverpool. The Egyptian king played in all 38 league games in 2018/19, starting 37 of them, and was only absent twice in his debut campaign. As Salah has now been diagnosed with Covid-19, Jürgen Klopp will have to plan to beat Leicester City without being able to call out their top scorer, which is fortunately rare.
Make no mistake, the absence of Liverpool’s No. 11 will leave a huge deficit in numerous key attacking stats.
A list of them would fill the word count requirement for this article, but this season Salah is in the top 10 Premier League players for (between many other things) goals, both expected and actual, as well as assists, shots, passes to the penalty area and players dribbled. For many of them, he is in the top three players or even at the top of the list.
There’s no point trying to replace that level of productivity by simply putting another player in the XI and waiting for them to deliver. Klopp will need to be more creative to make the most of the attacking options available to him.
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The first way to do this would be to play Sadio Mané as the focal point of the attack. He has played there four times for Liverpool (according to WhoScored), scoring two doubles against Newcastle in 2019/20 and Watford the previous season, as well as scoring one goal and setting up another in the 4-1 win in Porto. It almost makes you wonder why he hasn’t played there more with a record as strong as that.
And instead of forcing Roberto Firmino into a 4-3-3, the Brazilian should play in the center of the trio in a 4-2-3-1 formation. He has played there many times before, notably scoring a hat trick in the 5-1 win against Arsenal in 2018.
While he is not at his best this period, Firmino is still in the top 25 players in the division by expected assists (for FBRef) so you’ve been more creative than most people would guess.
He also created more direct pass opportunities than any other player in the Bundesliga in 2013/14. by WhoScored) so he’s eminently capable of threading passes through Leicester’s bottom line for Mané to take advantage of.
With Diogo Jota, Liverpool’s leading no-penalty goal scorer this season, able to take Mané’s usual spot on the left of attack, that leaves the question of who to put in Salah’s more common position on the right. And the man for the job is Xherdan Shaqiri.
The Swiss international has performed well in his limited appearances recently, also thriving on the right from 4-2-3-1 during his first months with the club in 2018.
There was a three-game hitting streak in the fall where he and Salah teamed up as an assist / scorer combination in every match, at a time when the Egyptian was the center forward, so hopefully the former player Stoke can achieve a similar goal. telepathy with Mané in the short term.
A trio of Shaqiri, Firmino and Jota behind Mané sounds pretty lethal, all things considered and will give the Leicester defense all sorts of problems to deal with. Mohamed who?
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