Enough about Mo Salah’s first touch, we really need to talk about the second

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There was a lot to have a look at, a lot to soak up. All of it in a flash, all of it earlier than West Ham knew what had occurred.

Eddie Howe mentioned on Match of the Day 2 on Sunday evening that greater than 4 passes in a counter-attack and your possibilities of scoring begin to decline. Liverpool seem all too conscious of that stat.

Trent Alexander-Arnold’s raking, liberating 70-yard move was beautiful, Shaqiri’s first-time cross was proper into the trail of Mohamed Salah and the Egyptian’s first contact… properly, the primary contact was heartbreakingly stunning.

Anybody who performed organised youth soccer on the damp parks of the UK on dreary winter mornings would be capable to inform you that technically that first contact was all fallacious.

“Don’t entice it along with your studs,” some fats bloke used to howl at you because the ball ran below your foot and out for a throw-in earlier than he screamed at the remainder of the 11-year-olds to “field them in.”

Thankfully for Liverpool followers Mo Salah wasn’t current on the waterlogged pitches of Britain’s parks to have his intuition and pure inventiveness crushed from his soul – he trapped the ball together with his studs, and it was good.

So there was the move, there was the cross and there was the contact.

However all of that’s ineffective, all of it goes to waste, if it isn’t for the end. And amongst all of the noise concerning the different components that led as much as the aim, the impetuousness of the end has been criminally ignored.

If Salah traps it completely, however then takes one other, heavier contact, Lukasz Fabianski is on him in a flash. If Salah takes that first contact, sees Fabianski coming, and takes it spherical him, then he has run the ball too far vast.

However Salah was as sharp as a katana.

His contact set it up, after which with the cheekiest, most completely weighted and completely timed outside-of-the-left-boot prod, he despatched it rolling in the direction of the far put up; gently sufficient to nearly tease the West Ham defenders who had busted a intestine to get again, however firmly sufficient to nestle satisfyingly within the nook of the London Stadium web.

As Jurgen Klopp advised Sky post-match: “Prior to now couple of weeks after we didn’t rating that many, the one factor you are able to do whenever you’re not scoring is to maintain attempting to make higher selections.”

On Sunday in east London, Salah’s split-second determination making couldn’t have been extra exact. And with it, he has snuck nearly undetected, like a ninja within the evening, onto 20 targets for the fourth season in a row. Salah and Liverpool had been meant to be off color, weren’t they?

“He’s a world-class participant,” Klopp concluded. You’ll must go some place else if you wish to discover somebody who’ll disagree with Jurgen on that depend.

𝐉𝐔𝐒𝐓, 𝐖𝐎𝐖! 🔥

An 𝙖𝙢𝙖𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜 breakaway aim, completed in unbelievable type by @MoSalah 😱👏 pic.twitter.com/FVIk8o9ozF

— Liverpool FC (@LFC) January 31, 2021