All stars lose their lustre in time, so why can't Slot see Salah is fading?

Egypt forward is struggling to contribute to a Liverpool squad that appears to be built by committee, but some tough choices must be made if the champions are to revive

- Barney Ronay

There must be blame. We need heads on the battlements. We need entrails, horses, chains, a public quartering. Basically we just need to feel something. We need, above all, to feel that this is all someone's fault.

This is how elite football must function now. The Dalai Lama once said that instead of looking to blame others we should look for answers within ourselves, which just goes to show how wrong you can be and is, frankly, very disappointing from the Dalai Lama.

It turns out medieval medicine was right. Human beings are indeed composed of four basic humours: bile, fire, earth and being incredibly angry on the radio, energies that must be constantly fed.

There is a central irony here. Rage and snark have become football's defining energy. There is simply too much space out there, too many content channels, but not enough actual sport to fill them. So perceived injustice, the divvying up of fault, fraud-dom, bald fraud-dom have become the game around the game.

But at the same time there is less to actually blame people for. Success and failure have become structural. Big clubs really are too big to fail in any meaningful sense. Managers no longer run teams like autocrats, surrounded by directors, assistants, data wonks. There is simply less space to actually make terrible mistakes on an individual basis, the kind of clear-as-day mistake that really does throw an entire team out of whack.

At which point, enter Arne Slot, who is out there making at least one very obvious, big-ticket managerial mistake. Why is Slot playing Mohamed Salah in every game? Why is Slot continuing to do this even when the evidence is clear that this is a mistake? One that can still be fixed, but which becomes more deeply compounded with every passing week.