Robbie Fowler says Liverpool have an ‘incredible’ player
Robbie Fowler has admitted that Liverpool forward Mohamed Salah is ‘unique’ after seeing him ꜱnɑtch the Reds Premier League scoring record.
Salah’s Sunday double against Manchester United meant he overtook Fowler as Liverpool’s top scorer in the Premier League since its inception in 1992. 129 goals and counting.
Far from being bitter about it though, Fowler has paid tribute to the remarkable excellence of our Egyptian King.
“Mo’s stats are unbelievable. It’s not just the number of goals, it’s the incredible rate at which he’s got them. It’s all about standards. He’s set such ridiculously high ones in the past that when there’s a slight drop-off people are quick to question him,” the man known simply as ‘God’ told The Athletic.
“But he’s still leading the way. He’s still the most potent weapon. It’s hard to do what he’s done so consistently at the highest level for so long. He’s effectively a right-sided ɑttɑϲker rather than a striker. He’s unorthodox, but he’s uniquely brilliant.”
Mo sets the record straight
Fowler is right – Mo is unique. The rate at which he scores from a wide position is quite unlike anything before seen in the Premier League.
People will point to players like Thierry Henry or Cristiano Ronaldo proceeding Salah in this, but they’d be wrong.
Mohamed Salah
Yes, Henry did have a tendency to ɑttɑϲk from wide – usually from the left. But there’s no question that although he was a winger in his earlier days at Monaco and Juventus, he was very much a centre-forward at Arsenal.
Ronaldo is perhaps a more direct comparison to Salah. Even then though, by the time Cristiano was scoring bucket-loads at Manchester United, he was also playing more centrally. The Portugal icon only truly had one exceptional goal-scoring season in the Premier League anyway.
Our No.11 on the other hand has been slamming balls past unwitting ‘keepers for the last six years. Despite opposition defenders surrounding him game after game, Salah is still finding a way through.
This season may not have been a vintage one for Mo, but Sunday showed just how good he can still be. 22 goals in a season where Liverpool have struggled is quite remarkable. Hit 30, and he would reach that milestone for a third campaign running. Not bad for a one-season wonder. Congrats on your record, Mo, here’s to many, many more!
Where does Mohamed Salah stand in Liverpool’s pantheon of Premier League greats?
For decades now, Liverpool ɑttɑϲkers and their penalty box prowess have been measured on a scale of ‘one’ to ‘Robbie Fowler’.
The iconic Toxteth Terror, later rechristened God by those in the stands and on the training ground with him, was the fastest player to reach 100 goals for Liverpool and provided moments of magic during a difficult time for the club, as they fell back away from the country’s top sides during the 1990s. He has largely always been heralded as the greatest finisher seen at L4 in the current era, even as newer players arrived with perhaps other strings to their bow.
Fowler eventually netted 183 goals for the Reds, across two spells comprising 369 appearances to be the sixth-highest scorer of all time, while no player had scored more than his 128 strikes in the Premier League.
Until Sunday, when Manchester United received a hammering at Anfield, and Mohamed Salah displaced him with two of the team’s seven goals.
The Egyptian now has 129 in the top flight in just 205 league games – 61 fewer than Fowler’s match tally – and the Kop now have a геаl contender to displace their former local hero as the greatest Anfield marksman of the modern age.
Casting the net wider, Salah, whose league tally is bumped by two for the pair of goals he scored at Chelsea way back in 13/14, has moved clear of the likes of Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Robbie Keane, Nicolas Anelka, Dwight Yorke and Romelu Lukaku this season. All are high-profile predatory talents in their own right, several who played in the Premier League for much longer than Salah has so far.
The company he’s around, entering the league’s top 15 scorers since its inception, highlight just how consistently he has troubled opposition goalkeepers since joining Liverpool from Roma in 2017. Jamie Vardy is next in his sights and a place in the all-time top ten is eminently reachable next season.
Questions over exactly where Salah sits among Premier League legends are difficult to accurately gauge, given the subjective nature of such rankings – and the inherently tribal nature of supporters, who will almost always prefer someone who played for their own club over another.
Of course, he’s also somewhat different to most of the other all-time top scorers in that they were strikers; in the top 20 the only names appearing who were not traditional No9s are Wayne Rooney, who was a nine, a ten and a central midfielder at different stages, ɑttɑϲking midfielder Frank Lampard and now Salah, who plays predominantly from the right wing.
But add in Salah’s league title, him being one of only three players to win (or jointly-win) the Golden Boot three times, his assist rate, his all-round impact on the team around him and his incredible consistency over the past six seasons and counting, and he’s certainly in the conversation as one of the finest forwards the modern-era top flight has ever seen.
For Liverpool and the club’s fans, the question is now of whether he’s at the top alone – having now surpassed Fowler’s league tally, having won a title where the Scouser did not and having every likelihood of surpassing the same player’s overall number of strikes very soon, too. He’s just five behind, having played around 4,000 fewer minutes.
Salah’s goal numbers alone are not the full story, but each one adds weight to the argument he has left all others behind him.
Volume, consistency, quality and importance – the current No11 can point to each of those in his corner.
The teams he has scored against most frequently, for example, are Manchester United and Manchester City.
He has a dozen against the Red Devils now, ten in the league. Nobody has scored more for Liverpool against United, their biggest rivals. Ever.
Salah also has another 10 against City – the greatest obstacle to Liverpool racking up even more trophies in recent seasons.
Three players from yesteryear do have more than him there, with Gordon Hodgson, Kenny Dalglish and Ian Rush ahead, but they faced City in a rather different era: that of Kevin Bond rather than Kevin de Bruyne, David White rather than David Silva.
That prowess in front of goal on the biggest occasions has endeared Salah many times over to the home faithful; he already had the strike-rate to match other recent Anfield heroes but his longevity has kept him firing for far longer than the likes of Fernando Torres or Luis Suarez managed.
They departed scoring 81 and 82 respectively; Salah has a near-identical goals-per-games ratio to the latter but more than double the number of strikes.
He is unquestionably the greatest forward Liverpool have ever signed in the Premier League era, talented and hard-working, technically gifted and tactically sound, and adding the silverware he and supporters craved in the process, where others fell short previously.
As for whether he has now surpassed Fowler, the arguments have long since stacked up in his favour, in TгᴜтҺ.
Fowler had the intangibles which no new signing could ever match: local affinity and connection, the emotion of his return, a near-lifelong connection with the club after emerging through the ranks. In the eyes of some he’ll never be displaced for those reasons.
But Salah’s own off-pitch and away-from-the-game efforts, though different in content, are no lesser in weight – just changed with the changing of the world in the intervening decades: from support of dockside workers to support of women’s rights, for example.
Salah wɑnteɗ to become Liverpool’s all-time highest scorer in the Premier League and acknowledged as such, that it was in his sights from his very first season on Merseyside.
Barcelona and Inter Milan make moves for Liverpool star Roberto Firmino with Saudi Arabian club readying ‘huge offer’
Barcelona and Inter Milan have registered their interest in Liverpool star Roberto Firmino following his announcement he is leaving in the summer, sources have told Football Insider.
The Spanish and Italian giants have made the first moves for the Brazilian forward, 31, as his Anfield spell enters its final few months.
A Saudi Arabian club is also believed to be readying a “huge offer” to Firmino as they look to lure him for a mega-money Middle East move.
The 55-times Brazil international is expected to be deluged with offers as a free agent going into the summer window.
His Liverpool contract expires in June, which will bring down the curtain on a memorable eight years at the club in which he has won every trophy available including the Premier League and Champions League.
Firmino’s representative Roger Wittmann геᴠеаlеd in an exclusive interview with Football Insider on Saturday that the player refused to hold talks with other clubs before deciding he will Liverpool leave on a free transfer this summer.
He communicated his decision last Wednesday to Wittmann before informing Jurgen Klopp at the club’s training ground last Friday before the news went public.
Firmino said he felt “unbelievably emotional” about leaving Liverpool and that was evident during his short cameo in Sunday’s sensational 7-0 Premier League win over Man United.
He came off the bench to score his team’s final goal and appeared to be in tears as he soaked in the adulation of the supporters and teammates.
Roberto Firmino
It was Firmino’s 10th goal of what has been a season interrupted by two months out with a calf ιnjᴜry.
He has also supplied five assists from his 24 matches in all competitions in what has been an impressive return in a season in which Liverpool have struggled to reach their previous heights.
In other news, Sources: Liverpool set for ‘big’ pre-season change after devastating ιnjᴜry blows.