Mohamed Salah: Chelsea still haunted by one of football's greatest misjudgments

Ten years ago this weekend, Mohamed Salah sat on the substitutes’ bench of a famous London stadium, watching and waiting. Behind him, close up and noisy in Stamford Bridge’s tight East Stand, supporters were becoming frustrated.

Their team, top of the Premier League, had turned impotent. The best African striker of a generation was having a poor day in front of goal; another forward, lured from the grasp of Liverpool, made little impact during his half an hour on the pitch. Only in injury time did the hosts, Chelsea, scramble a 1-0 win over Everton.

Salah never got on to the field, left instead to imagine how his speed might have made a difference, perhaps in place of Samuel Eto’o, the Cameroonian veteran picked as Chelsea’s centre-forward.

Or to wonder if he, Salah, who had angered Liverpool a month earlier by choosing to join Chelsea rather than them, would have been a more dynamic impact substitute than the ex-Red Fernando Torres.

The confidence of Torres, soon to turn 30, had waned visibly since leaving behind his peak years at Anfield for a burdensome combination of high price-tag and low goals-per-game ratio at Chelsea.

But such was the hierarchy at Stamford Bridge in 2014: age over youth, experience over fresh faces. Salah, 21, would spend many afternoons watching and waiting as a Chelsea employee. “He needs time,” the then Chelsea manager, Jose Mourinho, explained.

“Step by step, 10 minutes here, 10 minutes there,” advised Mourinho of the menu of first-team action Salah, signed for around €16m from Basel in that winter’s transfer window, should expect.

“We bought a kid from a different habitat, an Egyptian playing in Switzerland. We knew the kid was going to need time. We know next season he will be really good