7 hours ago
2
Mohamed Salah has six goal contributions in the opening nine games of the season for Liverpool, but the Egyptian has not been in the best of form over the last few months.
The former AS Roma winger has only netted five goals in his last 20 competitive Liverpool appearances, though that period does include the last few matches of last season, when the Premier League title was already wrapped up.
And Arne Slot has offered his theory on why Salah's goalscoring exploits might have slowed down for Liverpool, explaining that teams are setting up differently against the Reds, making things for difficult for his attackers.
"I see the same as the second half of last season, where he scored 12 goals — five from a penalty and one from a set-piece, so six open play goals," Slot said.
"He is part of a team that faces different opposition than the first half of last season.
"To make that more of an insight, if you compare how we won the away game against United where they tried to play out from the back and we took the ball off them three times, and at Anfield when Onana only went long, that's one of the answers why it is more difficult for us to score from open play.
This article contains affiliate links, we will receive a commission on any sales we generate from it. Learn more
"Mo is a part of this and you can see this in the second half of last season and the first part of this season. But now you are focused on Mo, the next time you are focused on Florian [Wirtz], then you are focused on Cody [Gakpo]...
"What I'm trying to say is that we don't score as many open play goals as we did first part of last season and this is something we work on very hard.
"The more we play under the new set-up, the better it will go. But we still struggle a bit to find enough goals from open play in the second half of last season and the first part of this season."
English (US) ·