Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp insists Mohamed Salah’s goalscoring drought does not bother him or the player as it does not mean his career is over.
The Egypt international, who scored an incredible 42 times in his maiden season at Anfield, has gone eight matches without finding the net.
However, Salah still has 20 goals for the season and played a pivotal part in the last-gasp winner against Tottenham on Sunday.
“When everybody is talking about ‘he didn’t score in I don’t know how many games’, he doesn’t seem to be bothered about it. I’m not,” said Klopp.
“For sure we didn’t really speak about it. I think if something is clear and obvious you do speak about it.
“How do you deal with a situation when he scored 40 goals last year?
“His career’s not over! It’s like if he can score this year 20 goals then he’s scored 60 in the last two. Wow, that’s not too bad!”
Salah’s success last season means he has attracted more attention from opponents in the current campaign, often being double-marked, and that has led to him not being as prolific.
It has had the effect, though, of benefiting team-mates with Sadio Mane (20) and Roberto Firmino (14) taking some of the burden.
“Sometimes you need a bit of time to adapt to the new situations and I don’t think he really needed that,” added Klopp on Salah’s overall value to the side and how he has coped with the close attention.
“He’s a threat. He helps us a lot. He deals with all the new situations for him really well.
“If you have only one [goalscorer], you think maybe you rely a bit too much on that. This year we don’t rely on Mo’s goals, but he’s still in a very good position in comparison to all the other players.
“Seventeen [league] goals is a good number, and there are still a lot of games to come.
“But it was never a problem. We have 79 points—you cannot have that with a lot of problems over the year.
“The thing is that because we had no major problems so far, we speak always about these other things.
“It’s not really something we speak about in the dressing room. Not at all.”
Liverpool travel to Southampton on Friday and Klopp reported a clean bill of health after a minor injury worry over key defender Virgil Van Dijk following the win over Tottenham.
“It looks quite good. No major concerns, actually. After the game, you think about Virg, but he trained OK, completely normal,” said the Reds boss.
“It was only a second recovery day but he took part in that, and I heard nothing different that he could maybe not train today. No, it looks all OK.”
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