Mo Salah is a special case - Liverpool star's critics are wide of the mark

For the self-proclaimed most exciting, richest, most interesting, most watched, most talked-about, toughest, quickest, most skilful competition in the entire history of club football, the opening exchanges of the 2025-26 Premier League have been fairly mundane. Nearly everyone has sort of done okay.

Wolves are the only team without a win but they are happy with their coach, so no real dramas, and while there have been a couple of managerial departures, neither truly came out of left-field. Form-wise, after seven match-days, the promoted three have managed to collect six wins between them, which is half the amount won by last season’s promoted three in an entire campaign.

Manchester United are getting a lot of flak but are two points and four places better off than they were at this point of their last campaign. Ahead of the eighth round of Premier League fixtures, Arsenal are a point shy of last season’s tally, Liverpool and Chelsea are three short while Manchester City are four short.

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It is all much of a muchness and even VAR has failed to provide a massive amount to get people arguing with any sort of conviction. There has been a relative lull in compelling storylines, which happens.

And which is why, perhaps, some people are getting worked up about the form of Mohamed Salah, who scored twice in a 3-0 win over Djibouti on Wednesday to guarantee Egypt a place at next summer’s World Cup finals. That means Salah might even have a rest when Egypt play their final group game against Guinea-Bissau - although according to a lot of pundits, he does not need a break.

Suddenly, it is hard to avoid Wayne Rooney’s take on matters but he has certainly not been alone in criticising Salah for his work-rate. Which would have been like having a pop at Picasso for not painting the garden fence regularly enough.

Salah has always made a token track-back or two but they are so rare, they often prompt a round of applause. The same used to happen with Thierry Henry.

If there is such a thing as an urban statistic, I suspect this was one of them, but in one prolonged spell of Arsenal fixtures, it was calculated his own goalkeeper covered more ground than Henry. Henry had two speeds. Dead slow and dead fast.

And while no-one can be excused basic defensive labour, there are special cases. Salah is most definitely one of them.

From day one, Arne Slot has been under no illusion about what Salah thinks his priorities should be on a football pitch. And considering those priorities do not include giving his full-back a hand, the pair have worked things out pretty well.

Salah’s numbers - two Premier League goals, two Premier League assists - are down year-on-year but that is probably down to uncharacteristically poor decision-making. More than usual, in situations when Salah normally threatens, he has chosen the wrong option. But that will be strictly temporary.

If you count this as some sort of slump, the reasons will be subtle. The changes in personnel, no matter how expensive the acquisitions, will take some getting used to.

And, of course, no-one should under-estimate the emotional strain of dealing with the loss of a close friend and team-mate. There could be more factors.

Opponents, for example, may have hatched fresh, more effective plans for Salah. But the bottom line is that Liverpool’s and Salah’s seasons are in their infancy.

Thanks to those three defeats on the spin, they have not gone spectacularly well but Liverpool’s points ratio would still have been enough for them to win last season’s Premier League. And both Premier League losses have been down to late goals.

It has been an intriguing rather than a spectacular start to the season, which is probably why Salah’s lack of pyrotechnics has been under the spotlight. But he will soon be burning brightly again, do not worry about that.

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