The former Liverpool defender has criticized the Egyptian in the past but says the current Player of the Year is certain to go down as a true Premier League great.
After 1,000 games as a manager of a professional soccer team, there are probably many opponents that Pep Guardiola would like to watch. Guardiola will reach that four-figure milestone late on Sunday afternoon when he leaves the Etihad Stadium for another match in the rivalry between Manchester City and Liverpool.
And this rivalry has always presented Pep with a particular problem: how to stop Mohamed Salah. Simply put, Salah has contributed more goals against Guardiola’s City than any other player in the Premier League, scoring nine goals and providing six assists.
In all competitions against City, Salah has scored 13 goals and provided eight assists. Spurs (16 goals, 5 assists) and Manchester United (16 goals, 6 assists) are the only teams where Salah has done better.
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And it was numbers like that that led Salah to the football world’s Hall of Fame. Jamie Carragher certainly thinks so.
“Sometimes when you look at goal scorers, it’s the hardest job, a lot of them maybe don’t score against the biggest teams or the best defenders, but Mo Salah does,” Carragher asserts. “And he deserves even more credit for that.
“He delivers in important games. When it comes to great strikers, Liverpool’s all-time best goalscorer is Ian Rush, but he famously didn’t score against Manchester United for many years.”
Strangely, Rush did indeed perform poorly against United, scoring just three goals in 34 games. However, Rush is generally regarded as Liverpool’s best striker, not least because of the fact that he leads the club’s all-time scoring list with 346 goals, 61 more than Roger Hunt’s total and 96 more than Salah.
But Carragher, who was speaking at the launch of Sky Bet and the British Heart Foundation’s pioneering Every Minute Matters campaign*, believes there needs to be a serious debate about who is the greatest Anfield frontman of all time.
“The debate over who is Liverpool’s greatest goalscorer will rage, but if you ask Salah about it, you know his first answer…I played on the wing and they played in the middle! And to be fair, there’s definitely something there.”
Indeed, Carragher, who criticized the 33-year-old Salah during last season’s contract dispute and received a heated response from the Player of the Year award, actually believes the Egyptian may be slightly underrated in the grand scheme of things. Carragher said: “When Salah is not at his best, I feel like he gets a little more criticism than other players, other great players, get when they are not at their best.
“Maybe it depends on the way he plays. He’s a real numbers guy. I feel like when you evaluate Salah it’s always about goals, it’s about assists and it’s about the data-driven game of today.”
“I feel like he’s not scoring or assisting, but what kind of impact does he have on the game? I see both sides of it.
“He’s not a player like Thierry Henry or Eden Hazard. Even if they didn’t score in the game, there would be a lot to watch and admire in their game. With Salah, his mentality is to aim for goals. He’s always aiming for goals.”
Carragher was one of the pundits to highlight his early season struggles, but there is no one who is a bigger fan of Salah’s contribution to English club football. “In some games it’s not the end of the world if Salah doesn’t play, but he’s always been in Liverpool’s best team.
“He’s one of the best professionals in the game. He’s going to be playing for years to come, red-shirted or not. And he’s one of the greatest players we’ve ever seen in the Premier League. It’s that simple.”
*Jamie has partnered with Sky Bet and the British Heart Foundation (BHF) to launch a major new awareness campaign as part of the EFL ‘Week of Action’ This new initiative is part of the pioneering Every Minute Matters campaign, which has already successfully inspired over 350,000 people to start learning CPR since the campaign was launched in May 2024.
New research carried out by Sky Bet and the BHF in partnership with Leeds Beckett University reveals significant gaps in CPR and defibrillation knowledge, confidence and skills across grassroots football Just 51 per cent of the grassroots football community believe their team is prepared to deal with cardiac arrest, but 83 per cent support the introduction of mandatory CPR and defibrillation training for all adult grassroots football managers.
Jamie says: “Too many people still think they only have to be a medical professional to intervene, but that’s simply not true. Anyone can learn these life-saving skills. It doesn’t matter who you are or what level you play, whether it’s Championship, Sunday league, five-a-side or walking football. If someone falls down, you need to be able to act confidently.”
“That confidence comes from training, which is why we encourage everyone in grassroots football to take 15 minutes to learn CPR and defibrillation using the BHF’s excellent free online tool, RevivR.”
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