Liverpool created a HOSTILE environment for Mo Salah's talents

Arne Slot has taken the decision to remove Mo Salah from Liverpool first-team duties.

The Egyptian King has started each of the last three Premier League games from the bench amid a decline in his goalscoring - and playmaking - output.

In this context the 33-year-old is being made to carry the can for a lot of Liverpool’s ills. Salah is the one dropped while others - such as Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak and Cody Gakpo - continue to earn the benefit of the doubt in attack.

There is clearly a malfunction in the way Liverpool go about creating and scoring chances. Rather than address this collectively it appears the Reds’ head coach has singled Salah out.

Predictably this has generated a furious response from Salah.

Salah's numbers are down

He is not happy with the situation and looks like he’s burned his bridges with the manager and his paymasters. What happens next is anyone’s guess.

But the fact of the matter is that Liverpool hollowed out the team around Salah - which drove him to stratospheric levels last season.

The gameplan was optimised to get the best out of the right winger and for large parts of the campaign it worked. Sure, Salah - like the team as a whole - slowed down as the season drew to a close but he worked hard to help the team achieve the title.

He scored 29 goals and assisted 18 more - the first time ever a player has won the Premier League top goalscorer award, the playmaker award and the player of the year award all at once.

But he didn’t do it alone.

Liverpool have sold Salah's supply

For most of the campaign he had Trent Alexander-Arnold alongside him.

Although they didn’t combine directly for many goals last season - two away at Newcastle stand out - there is no dispute that Trent’s long passing capabilities put Salah in the danger zone far more frequently than Conor Bradley or Jeremie Frimpong have been able to do.

Then there’s Luis Diaz. The duo enjoyed a very fruitful partnership last season.

And it was the manner in which Diaz pressed high and took on his man one-on-one which really helped characterise Liverpool’s Premier League title-winning season.

Although he started infrequently, Darwin Nunez was also a big part of Salah’s success.

Salah not given the right conditions to perform

The Egyptian King is on the record as stating how much he loved working with the Uruguayan. Consider these losses in the context of Salah’s tweet during the summer about asking for respect for the Premier League champions.

It’s clear Salah knew what the club were losing - and tried his best to sound the alarm. Slot has so far failed to launch anything close to a new-look attack.

Instead he’s simply tried to put Dominik Szoboszlai wherever he’ll fit and hope for the best.

Others get to coast while Salah gets blamed - when in actual fact the component parts are all failing. Critics would do well to remember this - Salah’s numbers are down, granted, but there are many reasons for that.

Not least Hughes and Slot’s failure to mitigate for the departures of Trent, Diaz and Nunez.

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