Jurgen Klopp has told Mohamed Salah he can’t compare to Manchester City’s goalscoring sensation Erling Haaland and he should accept the truth.
Salah, 30, won his third Golden Boot award last season – but has scored just twice in the Premier League for Liverpool this term. Thirty-five miles away at the Etihad, Haaland has already found the net 19 times for the champions – 14 of them in the league.
Kop boss Klopp is backing his Egyptian forward to “explode” – but insisted he cannot measure himself against City’s new talisman. Klopp said: “With Mo, I hope he is close to exploding. But nobody in the world can cope with the Haaland situation at this moment.
“It’s crazy what he is doing. When he scored his second goal in the Champions League (against Copenhagen) he shook his head as if to say ‘I can do whatever I want and the ball bounces straight to my feet.’ Haaland is an exceptional player in an exceptional team, so that obviously works pretty well. I don’t think we should compare anybody with Haaland at this moment – at least I don’t.
“Mo wants to score goals. Definitely, desperately, definitely, 100 percent – and that will never change. Call him in 20 years and it will be the same. That will never change. With Mo, it is like this: even if his goalscoring numbers are not that crazy, you see how often he is involved in the passes for goals. The problem is, that if he doesn’t score a goal, then no-one appreciates that.”