How can we define what Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané are worth?

Naturally, the lasers lent the scene a certain pathos. As Mohamed Salah stepped up to take Egypt’s first penalty against Senegal on Tuesday night, the swarm of green laser beams dancing across his face were a reminder of football’s capacity to render even its greats temporarily powerless. Here was one of the biggest stars in the world’s biggest sport. But he couldn’t make his team win. He couldn’t get his country to a World Cup. And now he didn’t even have the use of his own eyes.

“I was luckier,” Sadio Mané said afterwards. This was his second consecutive triumph over his Liverpool teammate, Senegal’s two-leg World Cup playoff victory coming after the Africa Cup of Nations final in February. And yet for all the advance billing of the encounter as “Mané v Salah”, there was perhaps a wider lesson from the Senegal v Egypt trilogy, one with a particular and pressing relevance to the club they both play for.

Watching Mané and Salah across these three games offered a subtle but telling contrast. Though the playoff and the Afcon final were ultimately settled on penalties, Senegal mostly dominated in terms of chances and possession. Besides Mané they had the ever-present threat of Watford’s Ismaïla Sarr on the opposite flank, Boulaye Dia of Villarreal through the centre, a defence marshalled by the inspirational Kalidou Koulibaly. They had a system and a style, different approaches, different ways of playing.

Egypt, by contrast, had very little. Their main striker Omar Marmoush has a Bundesliga record of three goals in 23 games. The midfield may as well have been constructed of barbed wire: not so much a device for using the ball as for deterring it somewhere else. And so pretty much everything Egypt did went through their