Stevie G clearly hasn’t a clue saying Mo Salah is our best goalscorer and we need back in the team.
What an idiot.
What we need to do medium and long term is build a team that doesn't include salah.
Short term Salah either needs to be in a purple patch or get out of the way. Instead he's not. He's not even a good premier league forward at the moment.
I genuinely don't think anyone was bullshitting him about what his role would be this year. I just think we fucked up, predictably so, in our incomings. During this summer many people were wondering, well, these players are good, but how do you fit them all into a team with Salah.
Now we know you don't, you can't, and the destabilization of the team attempting to fix that unsolvable problem, while he was given all the time in the world to find form, has lead to the team completely breaking down. The more safety first approach that we are now sensibly taking to try to climb out of the shit is even less likely to have his involvement.
That's not some machievalian manipulation, it's just some difficult decisions not going right, and Salah failing to find any form. This is the worst he's ever been for us, and he's too old. Any time we spend trying to figure out how he can work for us is wasted, even in the short term, because he's off for afcon. If he wanted to figure out how he could work for us, that'd be neat, but I don't think it would change much. The fact that he can't face his own decline makes our future actions so easy, now did we provoke his reaction intentionally because we want to get rid? I doubt very much that slot did, the risk he's be taking under the immense pressure he's under would be insane. Edwards/Hughes? It's definitely a possible read, it'd be neat if they did, it would suggest they might actually be capable of intelligent ruthless decisions.