Mohamed Salah hat-trick puts gloss on Liverpool’s 7-1 demolition of Rangers

In the end, it was a story of the brilliance of Roberto Firmino; the perfectly timed runs, the probing and the velvet smoothness of his touch. That, and a most outrageous substitute’s cameo from Mohamed Salah. It was 3-1 to Liverpool when he came on in the 67th minute. He scored his first goal on 75 minutes; by the 81st, he had gorged on a hat-trick. A limited Rangers team was broken.

And so Liverpool eased to a second Champions League group-phase win over them in a little over a week and they are as good as qualified for the last 16. When Salah got his first, benefiting from extraordinary generosity in the Rangers backline to poke into the far corner, it was the prompt for the home fans to make for the exit.

When he added his second from the edge of the area, many more followed. His third – shaped into the far corner – brought him the fastest hat-trick in Champions League history.

The strange thing was that Liverpool had been dreadfully passive in the first half, falling behind to a smart Scott Arfield goal and fortunate to be level at the interval thanks to a Firmino header.

But all of that was forgotten as Firmino moved his team into the lead, setting up a riotous closing quarter when Liverpool subjected Rangers to an ordeal. Firmino’s backheel for Darwin Núñez to make it 3-1 was sumptuous and, late on, there was time for Harvey Elliott to add the seventh.

Rangers knew the size of the challenge, how it was win or bust for them in terms of progress in the competition. At the very least, they needed a reaction to the defeat at Anfield – a humbling in all but the scoreline; an occasion when the manager, Giovanni van Bronckhorst, was forced to lament an “obvious gap” between the teams.

Klopp shuffled the deck. With the