hope he’s got his slippers on...”
Maybe greatness always starts with
an enquiry about slip-ons – because
it’s certainly how it all began for
Mohamed Salah. The Egyptian was
spending his very first morning at
Liverpool in the summer of 2017,
and he had to be dressed for the
occasion. No slippers, no deal – at
least if the waiting nurse had
anything to do with it, her assertion
couched with an authoritative tone that
suggested this may not have been the first
footballer’s medical she’d ever overseen.
Perhaps all who aim for legendary status
at Anfield must first don the comfortable
footwear and win her seal of approval.
Thankfully, she was never going to get any
trouble from Salah. Liverpool’s new signing
emerged from behind a door giggling like
a schoolboy, ready for his MRI scan, wearing
a pair of natty white slippers – the sort of
freebies you get at a posh hotel spa – and
a fetching hospital gown. “Oh, you look nice!”
laughed the nurse. “You can’t take them
home, though...” Spoilsport.
The video of this exchange still remains on
Liverpool’s YouTube channel, charting the
No.11’s first day as a Red, and seems ever
more surreal in the context of the five years
that have followed – five years that have
turned Salah into one of the greatest players
in the history of an already fabled club.
The nurse probably had no idea quite how
significant the chuckling footballer stood infront of her was about to become – and she
wouldn’t have been the only one.
“I come back to this video every year,”
a Liverpool fan wrote online recently. “None
of us knew that this was the day we signed
the best player in the world.”
That summer, 10 players joined Premier
League clubs for a fee of £40 million or more.
Salah wasn’t one of them. Manchester United
splashed out £75m on Romelu Lukaku and
£40m on Nemanja Matic. Manchester City
signed Benjamin Mendy, Kyle Walker and
Bernardo Silva. Chelsea recruited Alvaro
Morata and Tiemoue Bakayoko (plus a £35m
Danny Drinkwater). Alexandre Lacazette
moved to Arsenal, Davinson Sanchez to Spurs
and Gylfi Sigurdsson to Everton. Elsewhere,
Neymar switched to Paris Saint-Germain for
£198m. Barcelona then shelled out £97m for
Ousmane Dembele.
Liverpool paid a rather more reasonable
£36.9m to lure Salah from Roma, and it
bought them a man who would change the
club’s modern history. Now, that man is sat
in front of FourFourTwo. He smiles as he thinks
back to that day when he walked into the
city, patted the ‘This Is Anfield’ sign for good
luck and officially became a Liverpool player.
The grin is because he knew exactly what
was going to happen next, even if few others
did. “I had a conversation with my friends
the other day,” Salah tells us now. “I said,
‘Do you remember what I told you when
I came – that we’re going to win the league
and the Champions League?’ They laughed
when I said that, because they’d supported
Liverpool for a very long time. They told me,
‘Everybody comes and says the same’.
“But I always expect great things from
myself. Even if you don’t achieve it, I always
think positively. When I arrived, I wanted to
win the Premier League and I wanted to win
the Champions League. I wanted to do
something great for this club. In the past few
years, I think we did something really good.”
That’s a pretty accurate assessment of his
first five campaigns on Merseyside, as the
undoubted star of Liverpool’s first side since
the 1980s to claim both domestic and
European glory. Kenny Dalglish, Ian Rush,
Mo Salah – his name belongs in that sort of
company now, and doesn’t end there. Move
over, Lionel Messi: the Egyptian in the gown
and slippers may well have become the
finest footballer on Planet Earth.A DINK OF BEAUTY
Ask Salah to choose his favourite Liverpool
goals, and he doesn’t pick the ones you might
immediately expect.
He’s already bagged 153 of them in just
240 appearances by the time he sits down
to chat with FFT at his home, just hours after
starting for Jurgen Klopp’s side in a lunchtime
fixture against Watford at Anfield. The Reds
won 2-0 and he’s arrived back to his family
in a decidedly good mood, even though
Manchester City return to the table’s summit,
thanks to victory at Burnley, shortly before
our interview begins. In January, though,
Liverpool had been as many as 14 points“I EXPECT GREAT THInGS O F
MYSELF. I THInK POSITIVELY
EVEn IF I DOn’T ACHIEVE IT”
Below “I can’t wait
to start playing with
Grujic and Klavan”30 June 2022 FourFourTwo
MO
SALAH