As Salah toils, Jota stepping up as Liverpool’s go-to scorer

DUBAI: It was an open-and-shut case for many, including his manager. Mohamed Salah was, it was declared on an almost weekly basis, the best soccer player in the world for the first half of this season, demonstrating the kind of elite-level scoring form only Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and more recently Robert Lewandowski have been able to produce this century. It wasn’t just the volume of goals — 22 in his first 23 matches — that he was putting away for Liverpool.

It was the sheer quality of them that took one’s breath away. None more so than the weaving solo effort he conjured up against Manchester City at Anfield in October, midway through a run of 10 straight games when he scored, that surely will go down as the Premier League’s goal of the season. “Come on,” Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp asked out loud, “who is better than him?” Fast forward six months and Salah is, in relative terms, in a rut.

Indeed, heading into a seismic return match against City on Sunday that could yet determine the destination of the title, there’s an argument to say he might not even be Klopp’s go-to striker. There are potentially a whole host of reasons why Salah is going through his worst scoring run this season, with no goals in five games in all competitions and no open-play goals in six weeks. Is he tired? He’s already played 47 games this season, after all.

Are painful losses for Egypt lingering? First there was the penalty-shootout loss to Liverpool teammate Sadio Mane’s Senegal in the African Cup of Nations final in February, then a loss — also via a shootout — to the same opponent in a World Cup playoff last month. Does it have anything to do with his current contract standoff with Liverpool? That would be unlikely. Maybe it’s