An image is stuck in my mind about Mohamed Salah this season. It was in the final minute of the game against Tottenham at Anfield, after he had just scored his second goal.
Salah has been so good that teams have been doubling up to mark him but on that day, Tottenham put three men on him to try and keep him quiet but it was impossible.
As Salah ran off to celebrate, I looked at those three lads from Spurs and could see them thinking: “how on earth did that happen?”
Mohamed Salah scored four goals in Liverpool’s 5-0 Premier League thrashing of Watford
Salah has enjoyed a sensational debut season at Liverpool and has scored 36 goals in total
He must be an absolute nightmare to try to contain. Salah, for a defender, has that horrible trait where you know what he is going to do and you can see what he wants to do but his feet are so quick and his skill is so great that it doesn’t matter what you do: you won’t stop him.
Like everyone else, I watched in awe on Saturday. Jurgen Klopp would have hoped for a big season from the Egyptian when he signed him last summer but privately he must be doing cartwheels over how it has turned out – 36 goals by the middle of March is beyond everyone’s wildest dreams.
To get to 40 goals would be an astonishing achievement, simply because of where he plays. He isn’t a centre-forward. He plays off the right and those little steps he takes – it looks like he is shuffling at high speed sometimes – have inflicted huge damage.
The current Liverpool players must feel as we did back in 1983-84 when Ian Rush scored 47, which is the individual club record for a season. Now there was a goalscorer.
It helped, of course, having the main man – Kenny Dalglish – behind him but we knew ‘Rushie’ was doing something special. It might sound daft to say but I don’t ever remember him missing.
Even if there was a half-chance, you would watch him and think: “that’s in” – and that’s what happened. It wasn’t that you expected him score – you KNEW he would score.
My room-mate that season, Phil Neal, hit the nail on the head about the confidence he gave us. We were in Romania, preparing for the second leg of our European Cup semi-final against Dinamo Bucharest, and I was a bit apprehensive about what lay in store, as we only had a 1-0 lead.
Billy Liddell (left) and Kenny Dalglish are two legends Mohamed Salah must try to match
Graeme Souness (left) and Ron Yeats both enjoyed fine careers while they were at Liverpool
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Phil said. ‘We’ll win today. Rushie will score.’ And that’s what he did. Twice.
What set Rushie apart was his ability to do it constantly and I’ll be intrigued to see what Salah does in his second year but, at the minute, he must feel nobody can stop him.
The biggest compliment I can give is you turn up at Anfield and expect him to do something magnificent. He is a joy.
Steven Gerrard (left) and Robbie Fowler are two more recent Liverpool legends to look up to
If he carries on in this fashion and helps the teams win trophies, he will have a chance of becoming one of the club’s most influential players of all time – I can’t remember a better debut season – and these are the standards to which he must aspire.
So I’ve put together my top 10 biggest influencers. I must, first, apologise to men such as Alan Hansen, Phil Thompson, Roger Hunt, Rushie, Michael Owen, Xabi Alonso and Luis Suarez that I couldn’t fit them in!
Trust me, I have agonised over it. But this isn’t about who is the best player and it isn’t in ranking order.