Players come and go all the time in football but some departures feel more significant than others, and it would be hard to get more significant than Mohamed Salah and Andy Robertson playing their final game for Liverpool Football Club before the two veteran stars and club legends leave the club.
It perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, then, to learn Liverpool are planning mosaics for the duo ahead of Sunday’s league closer against Brentford at Anfield, a game that could also be the final one in red for Alisson
Becker and Curtis Jones as well as a few others but which only Salah and Robertson have so far confirmed will be their own personal Liverpool finales.
Salah will get his mosaic on the Kop ahead of Sunday’s match, while Robertson’s will be laid out on the lower Sir Kenny Dalglish stand, and Anfield will surely seek to give the duo a proper send-off despite a disappointing and dispiriting season that only seems to be getting more acrimonious as the final whistle creeps closer.
Over the weekend, Salah took the bold step of publicly drawing attention to dropping standards at the club over the past year and explicitly said that heavy metal football and a high-energy approach for Liverpool “cannot be negotiable and everyone that joins this club should adapt to it.”
His comments were widely seen as a shot at embattled head coach Arne Slot, who has been given a difficult hand by sporting director Richard Hughes’ transfer dealings last summer that left the squad unbalanced and lacking in depth, leading to a situation where a team universally believed to be set up for long-term success a year ago is now seen as needing a complete rebuild.
Despite squad construction issues, though, Slot himself deserves criticism for a degraded press, a side lacking any identifiable patterns of play, and increasingly concerning issues around squad fitness, as well as the fact that we are now nearing the end of the season and still nobody having any idea what he is actually trying to achieve, tactically.
Hopefully, Anfield can find a way to balance their displeasure at how the Liverpool side gifted to Slot, Hughes, and chief of football Michael Edwards by a departing Jürgen Klopp has had a wrecking ball taken to it with their desire to celebrate the departing legends—though given Salah’s recent comments, he might actually be on board with a venting of frustrations.
