Spare a thought for Bafetimbi Gomis. Many of the Champions League records are firmly in the domain of Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. Very few reside with the former Swansea and Saint-Etienne striker. Yet for 11 years, Gomis had the distinction of scoring the quickest ever hat-trick in the most prestigious club competition. An eight-minute treble for Lyon against Dinamo Zagreb dislodged Mike Newell, who had held the record for the previous 16 years after his treble against Rosenborg.
If there was something charmingly implausible about the identities of the players who were responsible for the two most devastating displays of scoring in spurts the Champions League had ever witnessed, perhaps it is more appropriate that the mantle passes to Mohamed Salah. He has a greater propensity to be prolific, a proven ability to look unstoppable. He can be a magician with momentum. “We all know when it is running for Mo, he is exceptional, absolutely exceptional,” said Jurgen Klopp, who had started his trip to Ibrox by benching Salah.
But he brought him on, and suddenly Salah was always running and it was always running for him. In six minutes and 12 seconds of ruinous brilliance, he damaged more than just Gomis. Rangers’ storied history includes 55 league titles, but there was a solitary 7-1 defeat, and none at Ibrox. Until Salah turned a respectable win for Liverpool into a rout, sprinting and sliding through the home defence at will. It rendered him only the third Liverpool substitute to score three times, after Steve Staunton, a defender parachuted in up front, and Steven Gerrard, in a tour de force against Napoli. If that was Gerrard showing how explosive his best was, this was an illustration of the heights Salah can touch. In the process, he humiliated a club that had craved Champions League football during their 12-year exile. Rangers may not concur but it was a timely occasion for him to return to form, just four days before Manchester City visit Anfield. Of late, it has felt less like a shootout between Salah and Erling Haaland; the Egyptian will surely relinquish his Golden Boot to City’s golden boy.
They have been in different stratospheres for much of this season and Klopp described Pep Guardiola’s team, rather uncontroversially, as the best in the world. Rewind 12 months and he was branding Salah the planet’s outstanding player. Then he began the season with 15 goals in 12 games but such statistics were rather rarer in a more barren 2022. And then, in a 22-minute outing, he scored as many goals as he got in his final 17 outings of last season. There could have been another, too, with Allan McGregor denying him, though the Rangers’ goalkeeper’s respite was temporary. Salah seemed irresistible and unstoppable; there are points when he seems to be operating at twice the speed of everyone else, when he can slalom quicker than most players run in a straight line, when the ball appears magnetically drawn to him. And if Rangers’ capitulation exacerbated that impression, he had the quality of finish to accompany his physical superiority. Each of his goals bore distinct similarities with some of his others for Liverpool but he can specialise in the special. “All the goals we scored were exceptional,” said Klopp. “Mo came on and is on fire.”
After a season of frustration came a liberation Salah relished: he was liberated both from the bench and the right touchline where, in a tactical tweak, he has spent more of his time of late. He can prey on the weak and a Rangers defence worn out by Darwin Nunez’s running and Roberto Firmino’s cunning and depleted by the loss of the injured Connor Goldson looked anaemic.
They encountered a man whose hunger for goals was increased by his absence from his natural terrain: the penalty area. It felt particularly jarring that Salah had a lone touch in the Arsenal box on Sunday, because he can be defined by his relentlessness and his ubiquity. He suffered the rare ignominy of being replaced when Liverpool needed a goal. He had gone off in another defining game, too, removed away at Napoli after an hour of anonymity. For him, Liverpool’s second Champions League trip had a rather different ending.
If the theory was that Salah was missing Sadio Mane, he found a new sidekick: both enabled by Salah and obscured by him, Diogo Jota recorded a hat-trick of assists in six minutes and 12 seconds, even if the finisher was left with plenty to do on each occasion.
There have been times this season when it seemed Liverpool were trying to reinvent Salah, the scorer supreme, as a creator and this was a sudden reminder of his greatest strength. Yet there is a shift in duties amid the forward contingent. Nunez’s second goal in as many games was welcome but while Jota’s drought was extended, he now has five assists in his brief campaign. Meanwhile, the most selfless attacker, the player whose goal tally had gone down almost annually, was out on his own as top scorer until Salah’s sudden burst. Firmino was the game’s decisive figure, scorer of Liverpool’s first two goals, maker of the third. But he has spent much of his Anfield career being upstaged by Salah. In little over six minutes, the Brazilian was demoted to second billing and Gomis to second on a select but strange list.
