IAN HERBERT: Please don’t take the cash, Mo Salah. Your place in Anfield pantheon is far more precious than the riches of Saudi Arabia
- Mohamed Salah is wanted by Saudi side Al Ittihad amid an impending £118m bid
- The Egyptian could join a host of ex-colleagues who moved to Saudi this year
- Would Mohamed Salah ‘do the dirty’ on Liverpool by leaving? And what about Man United ‘diving’?: Listen to It’s All Kicking Off, Mail Sport’s new podcast
The smash-and-grab raid for Mohamed Salah has been coming. You could feel it in the air on a sultry night in Riyadh a few years ago, soon after Saudi Arabia had bought Newcastle United, in the testimony of the locals, who knew precisely which player they wanted their leaders to appropriate.
‘Salah would be huge here. He is a player of the Middle East, not just Egypt. He’s the one our country wants,’ an extremely confident English-speaking Saudi told me as I walked the streets that evening, searching in vain for evidence of any interest in the Gulf state’s new Premier League trophy asset.
‘Liverpool, Liverpool, Mo Salah,’ shouted a boy, hanging from a car window.
So it is safe to assume that beyond a transfer fee exploding the economics of British football, more personal wealth would be lavished on Salah from the Saudi state apparatus than his children and his children’s children would even have the imagination to spend.
And because the obscene numbers have chipped away at any notion of allegiance, commitment and sheer love of a place you came to call home, we are left waiting, watching and hoping today.
Saudi Pro League side Al Ittihad are preparing a £118m bid for Liverpool’s Mohamed Salah
The Egyptian is open to moving to Saudi Arabia but is Liverpool’s most important player
Hoping that it is not foolish sentiment to feel that the hallowed turf of Anfield — where Keegan, Dalglish, Souness and Gerrard once ran their race — might hold something more profound than the cash.
Hoping that flying towards the Kop end on myriad Saturday afternoons, the words of the anthem ‘running down the wing’ ringing in his ears and then that long, low refrain — ‘Salaaaah’ — will transcend brutal mathematical calculations for this player. Don’t do it, Mo Salah. Don’t take the cash.
There have been painfully few positive signs, these past few days. The Saudis have launched a full-frontal assault on Liverpool with their bids for seven of their players — the rich man’s route to supremacy, you might say, given that 11 v 11 on a football field proved too much for their Newcastle team last Sunday — and it has become perfectly clear which ones have no interest.
Those who speak for Alisson and Ibrahima Konate have made it known those players will stay and have no truck with this.
Not so those who speak for Salah.
What you hoped for from him was an unequivocal, public declaration of commitment to the club who have bestowed upon him the very best days of his life; the moments which he will still be playing back in his interior mind when he is old and grey. Salah has merely tweeted images of himself: ‘Being a tourist in London on my day off.’ Nothing more.
His agent Ramy Abbas’ words earlier this month — ‘Neither Mohamed nor I discussed this with anyone’ — were hardly emphatic, either. That’s how things are these days. A cryptic post. A nod and a wink.
When Kevin Keegan was desperate to leave Liverpool for the Continent in the late 1970s, sick of the 82 per cent UK super tax and envious of the facilities he saw Johan Cruyff enjoying at Barcelona, he couldn’t help but talk about it. ‘I’m not pleading poverty but I know my worth,’ he said. It was himself he seemed to be trying to convince.
Alisson (left) and Ibrahima Konate (right) have both been pursued by Saudi clubs but are staying at Anfield
Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp (right) watches on as Salah (middle) takes place in training on Wednesday
Jordan Henderson was Liverpool captain but left for Saudi side Al-Ettifaq in a £12m deal
When Jose Mourinho tried to lure Steven Gerrard to Chelsea in 2004, he was cast into a form of psychological torpor. ‘My head was battered,’ Gerrard related in his autobiography. The Kop meant more than the world to him, too.
Football is different now — a colder, more clinical place — and we are about to discover just how cold. What happens next will tell us whether Salah’s indelible moments — standing on the open top bus which bore the Champions League trophy along Liverpool’s packed Queen’s Drive, or on the Anfield Premier League champions platform after the most storied title success of modern times — are priceless to him.
Whether a place in the Liverpool pantheon is too precious to jeopardise with a move that would leave them bereft of their prime game-changer, knowing that this Premier League title is probably beyond them already.
Brazilian striker Roberto Firmino left Liverpool as a free agent after spending eight years at the club
Fabinho was one of Liverpool’s surprise departures as he joined Al Ittihad in a £40m transfer
We should all carry the hope that the Saudis cannot make this acquisition work because of the precedent it carries.
If they can spirit away one of our game’s brightest lights, a vital contributor to the competitive balance of a league in which so few clubs can break Abu Dhabi’s own stranglehold, then what hope for any club who sign players and help them to flourish and grow?
Keegan was persuaded to give Liverpool one final year, having announced a wish to leave in the summer of 1976. The club’s wily general secretary Peter Robinson conceived a plan by which the player would stay for a further season and in return Liverpool would do everything to get him to a foreign club that suited him, whatever the price. ‘I felt I owed them that,’ Keegan, who moved to Hamburg, later reflected.
Salah, of course, requires no help finding a foreign club that suits him, but does he feel that same debt of allegiance? We can only hope.
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