The scenes at the end of Egypt’s World Cup qualifier in Dakar were as horrifying as they were disturbing.
Mohamed Salah, bewildered, shocked, and disorientated, stumbled towards the tunnel amid a bombardment of missiles from the stands as security guards desperately protected his eyes and head from serious injury.
Yet you sensed it wasn’t the coin which hit him on the head that caused such devastation in his stunned expression, but the implications of what had unfolded in the shootout against Senegal. His nation were out of the World Cup, his chance to grace the ultimate football stage at the absolute height of his career now gone forever. Salah knows all about the depth of that disappointment.
He went to the last World Cup finals with a serious shoulder injury and was way below his best as Egypt stumbled out in the group stage. Now he will watch from home, and he knows only too well what that means. Salah makes no secret of his desire to win the Ballon d’Or, his seventh place finish last year behind the undeserving Lionel Messi not just a personal insult, but almost an expression of football’s inherent racism against the African continent.
And he knows without a World Cup to base next year’s challenge on, he will have to do something remarkable to break the glass ceiling which has stopped any African player in history from reaching the number one spot. As 100-cap Egypt national team legend Hosny Abd Rabo said in the light of the Senegal defeat, "Mohamed Salah has done what no other Egyptian, no other African could achieve, and he deserves to be the best in the world.”
Luckily, he is currently part of something remarkable indeed. Liverpool are still pursuing an unprecedented quadruple, and as his team-mate Virgil van Dijk suggested on hearing of Egypt’s exit, he has a powerful motivation now, to work in the Reds’ favour.
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Van Dijk said: “I am sure he will turn the disappointment into success for the rest of the season. We still have everything to play for so there are a lot of things still to achieve for him.” As Jurgen Klopp pointed out recently, no player in his squad has a greater appetite for success, a greater work ethic than Salah. “He is the best sort of greedy, he is driven, for himself and for the team,” he said simply.
Now that drive will increase. Salah is not one to lick his wounds, he is a player who wants to be the world’s best, as he said himself in an interview with GQ, it is “weak mentalities” who lick wounds and feel persecuted.
In that interview, he said if he was struggling he would “face myself and feel where I am”. His face in Dakar on Tuesday night said that process has already begun…and Liverpool’s quadruple bid, as impossible as that seems, could just be more than a distant dream now.
