Liverpool will be without Mohamed Salah for their Premier League meeting with Burnley after the forward’s Egypt side were beaten in the Africa Cup of Nations semi-final. Salah, who has spent much of the congested festive period away on international duty in Morocco, enjoyed a strong individual tournament but will not add a first AFCON winners medal after the semi-final loss to former clubmate Sadio Man\u00e9 and his Senegal side.<\/p>\n
The short-term consequence for Liverpool is clear. Salah will not be available for Saturday’s home game. Rather than returning to Merseyside, he will remain with Egypt to contest the third-place play-off against Nigeria, a match scheduled to kick off roughly an hour after Liverpool take on Burnley.<\/p>\n
That third-place game offers Salah a chance to increase a tournament total that already stands at four goals from six matches. Only Morocco’s Brahim D\u00edaz has more goals than the Liverpool forward in this edition, and both will be in contention for the Golden Boot alongside Nigeria’s Victor Osimhen, who also has four strikes.<\/p>\n
Manager Arne Slot must therefore plan without Salah for at least one more match. It appears likely that Dominik Szoboszlai will start on the right wing. Jeremie Frimpong has performed well in that position recently but is now required at right back following Conor Bradley’s season-ending injury, which points to Szoboszlai being moved back out wide.<\/p>\n
After the third-place fixture, Salah is expected to return to Liverpool on either Sunday or Monday. Given the workload of six matches for Egypt and the travel involved, it seems unlikely he will be immediately reinstated into the starting lineup upon arrival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Salah will miss Liverpool v Burnley to play Egypt’s AFCON third-place match; return expected Monday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5998,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,969],"tags":[1211,299,1305],"class_list":["post-5999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-premier-league","tag-africa-cup-of-nations","tag-arne-slot","tag-bench-selection"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999","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=5999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}