Mohamed Salah continues to be at the top of Liverpool’s hierarchy for taking penalties, according to Jurgen Klopp.
Earlier in the season, the Egyptian superstar missed from the penalty spot a few times, costing Liverpool points in Premier League matches against Bournemouth and Arsenal. Since then, Salah has converted against Tottenham and Fulham, and Klopp is pleased that Salah will continue to serve as the team’s top scorer on penalty kicks in the interim rather than Fabinho and Trent Alexander-Arnold.
The Liverpool manager has told reporters: “We had a conversation and he [Salah] wanted to stay the penalty-taker. We had a normal conversation about it and I said, ‘Okay, you are.’ You don’t feel great in that moment and that’s what he said. ‘I don’t feel right in that moment’, because the pressure obviously increases with the penalties you miss. Then Fab or Trent, who are two and three, give the ball to them. He smashed them and turned it around.
“I think with all the goals Mo scored, we can’t just judge it for two missed and go away from it. That’s what I meant when I said we’ll talk about it. It’s a conversation between two grown-up men. He enjoys these situations. The problem is before we missed the pen, we didn’t have one for 28 games or so. We train that, obviously, but it’s a special situation. You cannot. 28 weeks is like four years. It feels like forever and you can’t remember any kind of penalty. You miss and it doesn’t feel great. This little break after the Arsenal pen, the talk, the conversation, ‘Shake it off and go from there’. That’s exactly the right thing to do.”
While Salah has been effective in the final third of the field, Liverpool’s defensive struggles this season have been out of the ordinary. Alisson had to wait five games for his 12th clean sheet of the season, but they were still able to defeat Fulham by a score of 1-0 and maintain their unbeaten record. With a clean sheet, Alisson was on the verge of crying, according to Klopp. For us this season, it’s pretty uncommon. Particularly for him, it’s quite good.
When they meet Brentford on Saturday, Liverpool will be looking to maintain a tight defensive structure in the hopes of obtaining another penalty.
