Slot's tough stance leaves Salah with just one option

No more Mr Nice Guy, perhaps. If Arne Slot can cut a friendly figure, the Dutchman feels he has an inner toughness. In his most testing time, the Liverpool manager may have demonstrated that, even if the explanation was delivered in his usual mild-mannered fashion.

- RICHARD JOLLY IN MILAN

“Usually I'm calm, I'm polite but it doesn't mean I'm weak so if a player has these comments about so many things, then it's about me and the club to react,” he said. “We reacted in way you can see: he's not here.”

The player in question, of course, is Mohamed Salah: indisputably one of the greatest in Liverpool's history, but a man Slot first dropped from the team and then, after Salah's explosive interview on Saturday, removed him from first-team contention. Salah had accused Liverpool of throwing him under the bus. Slot responded by not taking him on the plane. Liverpool arrived in Milan to face Inter without three wingers, with Federico Chiesa ill and Cody Gakpo injured. It could have offered a reason to give Salah a reprieve.

Slot opted not to. The conversation at training was, Slot said, “a short one”. He elaborated: “We have let him know that he is not travelling with us. That was the only communication from us to him. Of course, before Saturday the two of us have spoken a lot, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.” But brevity sufficed after a breakdown in their relationship.

The Egyptian had claimed he does not have one with his manager any more. Slot's perspective was different. “That is not the way I feel, but he has the right to feel how he feels things,” he said. “I haven't felt that at all until Saturday evening for sure.”