Arne Slot has left Mohamed Salah on the bench for consecutive Premier League matches for the first time in the forward’s Liverpool career. The decision follows a remarkable 2024\u201325 season in which Salah finished with a record-equalling 47 league goal involvements, and a quieter start to Liverpool\u2019s title defence this term.<\/p>\n
Salah has contributed just six goal involvements in 12 games before his omission at the weekend. The 33-year-old is understood to have not taken kindly to his omission, but Slot framed the choice as part of a load-management approach as Liverpool navigate a congested schedule. The club are partway through a run of four games in the space of 10 days, and Salah\u2019s absence from the XI for Wednesday\u2019s game may suggest Slot is pushing in a new direction after having relied almost exclusively on him last season.<\/p>\n
Slot told Sky Sports: \u201cI play the same team, it\u2019s a balance between continuity and freshness. It\u2019s obvious and clear that we need the full squad because a few who start aren\u2019t able to play a full 90 again. More than ever, we need more than 11 players.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the players have a chance to come in, Mo is definitely one of them. It’s a good thing we have players like Mo available on the bench,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Liverpool\u2019s 2\u20130 victory over Nuno Esp\u00edrito Santo\u2019s Hammers at the weekend \u2014 a match in which Florian Wirtz impressed and Alexander Isak found the net \u2014 appears to have reinforced the manager\u2019s selection approach. For the midweek visit from Sunderland, Slot has made a single change: Andy Robertson comes in for Milos Kerkez. Joe Gomez and Dominik Szoboszlai are poised to start down the right flank against the Black Cats, reflecting Slot\u2019s emphasis on squad rotation and freshness across a demanding stretch of fixtures.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Slot defends benching of Salah as Liverpool manage four games in ten days by rotating players ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4871,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,172],"tags":[195,220,299],"class_list":["post-4872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-epl","tag-alexander-isak","tag-andy-robertson","tag-arne-slot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4872"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4872\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}