Salah's touchline tantrum hints at deeper Reds split

In a sense, Mohamed Salah's season has come full circle. It started with a display of dissent amid a substitution in London, the Egyptian contriving to rip a rather small bandage into an absurdly high number of pieces when taken off at Chelsea.

- RICHARD JOLLY

Some eight months later, Salah was irritated when being brought on at West Ham. Now some of the context has changed: his latest touchline tantrum in the capital came after a player who was long an untouchable had been benched following perhaps the poorest run of form of a great Liverpool career and by a manager who is departing.

If Salah’s alliance with Jurgen Klopp, an enduring relationship that has benefited both hugely, may be ending with a hint of acrimony, that could be a shame; certainly it seemed a symbolic moment of how Liverpool’s season is suddenly falling apart. Equally, his August irritation at Chelsea changed little. Salah’s displays in the first half of the campaign were sufficiently scintillating that he looked a player-of-the-season contender.

Has the latest incident actually altered anything? The backdrop is still the same: that Salah, like Virgil van Dijk and Trent Alexander-Arnold, has a year left on his contract and that his future will be figure high on the to-do list of the incoming powerbrokers, Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes. His recent performances invite the question if this is just a rare dip or a sign that, after 696 games before his 32nd birthday, he is over the hill and accelerating down the other side.