the times | Tuesday March 15 2022 2GM 67
Sport
Liverpool are sweating on the fitness of
Mohamed Salah before tomorrow’s
crucial Premier League game away to
Arsenal, with the forward appearing to
miss a training session yesterday.
Salah, who was not in any of the
training pictures published by the club,
is recovering from the foot injury he
suffered in Saturday’s victory over
Brighton & Hove Albion.
The Egyptian limped off in the 63rd
minute shortly after scoring a penalty
in the 2-0 win at the Amex Stadium,
with his manager, Jürgen Klopp,
suggesting that his club’s leading scorer
had suffered the problem when a
previous attempt was blocked.
Salah, 29, has missed only a handful
of games through injury since joining
Liverpool in the summer of 2017 and his
inability to continue against Brighton
caused immediate concern among the
Liverpool coaching staff. “He thinks it’s
not serious,” Klopp said. “But you can
see when Mo Salah is sitting down then
something is not 100 per cent right.”
Salah a doubt for Arsenal game
Liverpool’s visit to the Emirates
Stadium represents their game in hand
on the league leaders Manchester City
and will be a stern test of Klopp’s side,
who have won their past eight league
games.
Salah has now scored 20
Premier League goals for the fourth
time in his five seasons at Anfield and,
although his absence would be a blow,
Klopp has Roberto Firmino fit again,
while Diogo Jota, Luis Díaz and Sadio
Mané are all available.
Ibrahima Konaté, the French centre
half signed from RB Leipzig, is also back
after a two-match absence.
Meanwhile, Liverpool are looking to
add to their academy ranks by signing
the Celtic youngster Ben Doak.
Doak, a pacey winger who turned 16
in November, would be able to move
from his boyhood club for minor
compensation as he is not on a profes-
sional contract.
Celtic are loathe to lose the teenager
and have handed him two runouts as a
substitute in an attempt to prove that he
has a pathway to regular first-team
football at the club.Paul Joyce
Northern Football Correspondent
O
f all the achievements
that Lionel Messi may
have hoped to tick off
upon signing for Paris
Saint-Germain last
summer, being jeered by an entire
stadium of his own supporters was
probably not among them.
Yet in PSG’s 3-0 home win over
Bordeaux, that is precisely what
happened. Messi was booed when his
name was read out prior to kick-off.
He was booed every time he touched
the ball. He was booed even when he
supplied the passes that led to PSG’s
first and second goals. Neymar, scorer
of that second goal, was booed too,
along with practically every single
one of his team-mates. Four days on
from PSG’s latest Champions League
capitulation at the hands of Real
Madrid, the mutinous atmosphere at
the Parc des Princes on Sunday
marked the biggest display of dissent
since the club’s Qatari owners first
planted their flag in the French
capital in 2011.
Yesterday morning, staff reporting
for work at the Parc des Princes, the
club’s Camp des Loges training base
and the PSG offices in Paris’s chic
Boulogne-Billancourt district
discovered walls tagged with graffiti
calling for the PSG president, Nasser
Al-Khelaïfi, and the sporting director,
Leonardo, to resign. “Paris will never
be Qatari” read one message spray-
painted in black on a wall beside the
stadium’s main entrance. According to
the newspaper L’Équipe, further
protests are planned for PSG women’s
Champions League quarter-final
home leg against Bayern Munich on
March 30 and the men’s clash with
their arch-rivals Marseilles on April 17.
Even with PSG 15 points clear at
the top of Ligue 1, the dissent had
been fomenting for weeks. During a
1-0 league win over Rennes in
February, fans unfurled a series of
banners protesting against the club’s
management, denouncing the
absence of a coherent sporting project
and deploring the marketing motives
that have led to PSG playing games in
their third and fourth kits rather than
their traditional colours of blue, red
and white. PSG’s history may date
back only 52 years, but it is a history
to which the club’s supporters cling
fiercely. There was anger, too, over
PSG’s limp penalty shootout defeat by
Nice in the last 16 of the Coupe de
France — a competition that the club
had dominated in recent years.
PSG’s second-half collapse against
Real Madrid last week, which recalled
previous Champions League
calamities against Barcelona in 2017
and Manchester United in 2019, left
supporters seething. With PSG having
broken through their own glass
ceiling by reaching the club’s first
Champions League final in 2020, such
humiliations were supposed to have
become a thing of the past. Messi was
no more culpable than any other
player for the meltdown in Madrid,
but he and Neymar seem to have
been explicitly targeted during the
Bordeaux game because they
symbolise a project in which superstardefensive work, he finds himself
piloting a group of players who drift
through matches, almost entirely
reliant on flashes of inspiration from
Mbappé. French champions-elect
they may be, but they are a world
away from the snapping, snarling
machine of a team that the
Argentinian built at Tottenham.
There is speculation in the French
media as to how far the shockwaves
from the Bernabéu debacle might
spread. While there seems little
danger of Al-Khelaïfi being removed
from his post by the decision-makers
in Doha (not least after using last
year’s Super League controversy to
enhance his status within Uefa and
the European Club Association),
Leonardo’s position as sporting
director – a role to which he returned
in 2019 – looks much less secure.
With the World Cup in Qatar on the
horizon, 2022 should have been the
crowning glory of the Qataris’ PSG
project. Instead, the club are, once
again, a laughing stock, humiliated
abroad and derided at home. The
galacticos model has not yielded
Champions League success and has
been noisily, angrily rejected by the
fans. A crucial crossroads awaits.players are piled on top of each other
without any apparent forethought as
to how they might play together.
Messi has frequently looked a
shadow of the player he was at
Barcelona, traipsing around the pitch
uninterested and seemingly shorn of
the burst of acceleration that would
leave opponents floundering during
his pomp at the Nou Camp. While the
34-year-old has supplied a league-
leading ten assists in Ligue 1 (level
with his team-mate Kylian Mbappé),
he has scored only twice in the league
and flickered sporadically in the
Champions League. Neymar has
appeared comparably diminished. The
one player spared by the boo boys
against Bordeaux was Mbappé. With
26 goals to his name in all
competitions, he – alone – is living up
to his billing, yet for all PSG’s
determination to hold on to him, there
is growing expectation that he will
join Real Madrid when his contract
expires at the end of the season.
The head coach, Mauricio
Pochettino, also seems certain to
leave. Obliged by the club’s
recruitment strategy to build his team
from the front with forwards who do
not even pretend to take part inMessi’s fall from grace
Lionel Messi has become less productive in almost all attacking categories since
leaving Barcelona for Paris Saint-Germain, apart from assists
(in metrics per 90 minutes from this season compared to last)0.26 0.421.07 0.715.82 3.68110.3 307.483.8 126.614 862 580.82Barcelona 2020-21 PSG 2021-220.29Goals per 90 minutesAssists per 90 minsGoal involvements per 90 minsShots per 90 minsMinutes per goalMinutes per goal involvementShot conversion rateWin percentage3. 68307 .41 26.6858PSG 2021 2229nsntPSG’s seething fans turn
their fire on fading Messi
The Argentinian and
Neymar have become
scapegoats for the club’s
failed superstar project,
writes Tom Williams
The training ground was defaced by messages against the club’s Qatari ownersTWITTERLiverpool
BEN STANSALL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESsince the clubs’ previous meeting in October, and Silva, inset, squanders a chance
18
Consecutive Premier
League games before last
night in which Manchester
City had scored — since a
2-0 defeat by Crystal
Palace in October9
Matches in which Palace
manager Patrick Vieira is
unbeaten in the Premier
League against City as a
manager (P2, W1, D1)
and as a player
(P7, W6, D1)