For a long time, Liverpool supporters had grown to be suspicious of Ramy Abbas.
On Friday afternoon that was no different, as Abbas, better known as Mohamed Salah's pesky agent, took to Twitter to seemingly provoke fans at the apparent impasse between Liverpool and his client as both parties had spent months trying to thrash out a deal to extend the Egyptian's stay on Merseyside.
Fans were immediately furious, with club legend Jamie Carragher even moving to decry the latest 'cryptic' tweet from Salah's representative.
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Wage demands were supposedly lightyears apart, as was the all-important length of the contract and with each tick of the clock, as Salah's contract edged closer to July 2023, it appeared there was only one resolution available; departure in a year's time.
However, that potential chain of events was extinguished later on Friday afternoon as Abbas' cryptic Tweet was in fact a well-worked lure in tandem with the club to stage a mesmerising announcement to one of European football's longest and most tedious sagas.
Salah had finally signed a new, three-year deal at Anfield.
The 30-year-old will become the highest-paid player in the club's history, earning £350,000 per week. A figure that could rise to over £400,000 should he continue to score goals and achieve success at the same rate
It's a deal that will be worth close to £60m over the course of the three years, and also represents a huge show of ambition from owners Fenway Sports Group. Indeed, the Liverpool owners, via Julian Ward, have found a way to pay Salah top dollar while also keeping within the club's carefully constructed pay structure. When the dust has settled, there will no doubt be a doff of the cap from the Liverpool manager to his bosses.
Salah follows Virgil van Dijk (30) and Jordan Henderson (32) as members of the Reds' squad that have received extended contracts in recent times, which would have gone against the owners' initial blueprint only a few years ago. However, Gini Wijnaldum and Anfield icon Steven Gerrard are just two examples of players who have found themselves supposedly undervalued and underappreciated by the contracts they had been offered to them during their last months on Merseyside, before walking away as free agents.
And while the decision to meet the Egyptian's wage demands will no doubt have been viewed as a risky one for the club's hierarchy, Salah could yet produce the best form of his Reds career to date in the early months of his new deal.
Salah will return to Kirkby late next week, in what is a delayed start to pre-season, with the rest of his teammates who had international commitments in the immediate days after the Champions League final defeat in Paris. Nineteen senior Liverpool players will get their pre-season preparations underway on Monday before the whole squad flys to Southeast Asia the following week.
Salah's return to club football will occur after nearly four weeks of vacation, representing one of the longest periods of time the Egyptian has enjoyed without summer commitments since 2016, having only been bettered by the extended break he enjoyed last summer.
Following a remarkable debut season on Merseyside where Salah toppled the Premier League record for the number of goals in a single campaign, 32, he sustained a brutal shoulder injury during the Champions League final in Kyiv. But was quickly forced to strap up and front a brave face as he turned out for Egyptian's first World Cup campaign since 1990, featuring in two of their three group stage games.
The following season, he accumulated a haul of 4,331 minutes for Liverpool in a campaign where they took their 97-point Premier League title pursuit to the final day before winning the European Cup weeks later - with Virgil van Dijk and Alisson Becker the only two players to feature more prominently. Later that month he was fielded in all four of Egypt's Africa Cup of Nations games.
2020 saw Salah and his teammates, disrupted by the pandemic, have just 46 days between their final game of the restarted 2019/20 campaign and the beginning of 2020/21. Yet, despite the brutal turnaround, Liverpool's No.11 dragged Jurgen Klopp's side to an impressive third-place finish by firing 22 league goals.
Last campaign the Egyptian was handed a luxurious seven-week break during the off-season, coupled with a full pre-season with Liverpool, which was central to his ruthless early-season form in the Premier League as he scored 10 goals during the first nine outings.
“Even top players need a break. This in combination with a full pre-season created the right base,” Liverpool assistant manager Pep Lijnders told The Athletic in October.
“Sometimes people underestimate the importance of regaining freshness after emotional, high-intensity playing periods. His mentality since the start of the pre-season has been outstanding. He’s a true example.”
Salah's consistency over the first half of the last campaign was remarkable as 15 of his 23 Premier League goals came before the turn of the year. Still hurting from the disappointment of the previous campaign, where Klopp's men sunk to six-straight league defeats at Anfield for the first time in their history, Salah had a point to prove.
Regular Ballon D'or conversations became the norm around the outskirts of Anfield because of the Egyptian's excellence during the closing stages of 2021, underlined by two fantastical goals against Manchester City and Watford. But it will be Liverpool's failed quadruped bid, which remarkably spanned 62 games in four separate competitions, that will become Salah's fuel for the upcoming season.
Pictured with the Premier League's Golden Boot award in the palm of one hand and the Premier League's Playmaker award in the other, Salah took to social media just days after the Champions League final defeat to Real Madrid in Paris to express his thanks to fans for their unwavering support. However, despite the 63 games at club level, he revealed his eagerness for the 2022/23 campaign to start immediately.
" I cannot express in words how much we wanted to bring that trophy back to Liverpool but in the end, we couldn’t," read the Tweet.
"I cannot thank the fans enough for your support. It has been a very long season but a part of me wishes the next one starts again tomorrow."
But at the age of 30, which is proving to be akin to the new 25 due to the incredible recovery means available in the modern game, a six-week break during the Qatar World Cup period in November and December will allow Salah to rest up from afar. It's a break that has been viewed as even more valuable given the condensed scheduling that he and his Liverpool teammates will have to adhere to between August and November.
There will be glasses toasted aplenty in the boardrooms of Anfield this weekend, as Julian Ward knows he's solved Liverpool's greatest transfer dilemma.
The sage is finally over. And everyone's a winner at Liverpool.
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