Michael Owen has claimed that Mohamed Salah’s desire to score drove Liverpool on to hit nine goals against Bournemouth yesterday.
Speaking to premierleague.com, Owen said that as Salah hadn’t scored yet, Liverpool kept pushing for more goals.
“Certain teams when they go a few goals ahead you think they’ll probably ease off now,” said the former Reds striker.
“But when you’ve got someone like Mo salah who hasn’t got on the scoresheet and didn’t all game, you think ‘you know what, they’re going to keep gong here.’ Because they’re all hungry for goals and you just knew it was going to be a big score.”
Salah takes a backseat in-front of goal
It’s a strange quirk that Salah didn’t get any of Liverpool’s nine goals on Saturday. Probability wise, that feels almost impossible.
Not only did the Egyptian fail to score, he also didn’t manage to register an assist, either.
In a way, that’s really encouraging for Liverpool. It never pays for a team to be over-reliant on one goal scorer, or one creator. Having lost Sadio Mane, The Reds will perhaps look to Salah more than ever this season.
We all know that Mo will be back in the goals. Even without one today, Salah still has three in five games this season.
As a result, it was nice to share the goals around today. Luis Diaz now has three in his last three games as he looks to take on Mane’s goal scoring mantle. A brilliant start to the season by any standards.
For Firmino it was also important to get off the mark for the season. That his two goals brought up 100 at the club was a nice bonus, too.
Liverpool will need both players to chip in this season as they look to battle on all fronts again. To have them in-form while Salah takes a backseat is no bad thing.
It’s a good job they were too, as Mo couldn’t hit a barn door today. The less said about his open goal miss the better!