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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
Sport
John Aldridge

Mohamed Salah has to be dropped with Liverpool in danger of becoming new Manchester United

I’m one of Mo Salah’s biggest fans but he needs to be dropped. He needs to be left out because he’s not doing himself justice and he’s not doing the team justice.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re Mo Salah, Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi. At that stage you’ve got to be left out for your own good. Whether Klopp can actually do that now that Diaz is injured, I don’t know.

Mo’s not the only one, don’t get me wrong. There are so many players below form and they have been for a while. The manager’s trying to get them to play through it. It’s very loyal but he doesn’t really have many alternatives.

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READ MORE: What Luis Diaz did while walking through Liverpool mixed zone on crutches

You can’t play games like the last two games, they’ve needed four goals to win. They should have won with three goals against Brighton, they should have drawn with Arsenal.

They’ve given themselves too much to do time and time again. You can’t play games, as good as they are going forward, you can’t be playing games where you need three or four goals to get a result.

No clean sheets in the league for a while, since Everton. And that should have been two or three-all. It’s worrying, of course it’s worrying. We’re slowly becoming the new Man Utd. That’s not right, that’s not Liverpool.

Another formation change and Fabinho has to start

The four players upfront, and you can include Bobby in that, are all fantastic players. They can work but to make it work, you need to have a real holding midfielder in the midfield two who can get across and get the tackles in.

Fabinho ’s the one but he’s not been playing well this year. Can Hendo do that? He’s a creative midfielder for me, like Thiago. They’re creative. You need someone who can really defend and shield your defenders.

It’s not ideal to have Hendo and Thiago there together because it’s not in their DNA. They can do a good job, don’t get me wrong. But their job is different to what we need when you’re going to play four front lads up.

You need to play at least one proper defensive midfielder. Maybe two on some occasions. Fabinho has to play against City. You have to have defensive players on the pitch who can do a job.

Klopp might have to go back, with the injury of Diaz, and revert to 4-3-3 but we’ll have to see. With Diaz out, the front three is going to be Jota, Nunez or Bobby and then Mo. They haven’t got another right-winger, the only other one is Jota who can play out there, who’s going to get you goals really. That’s where we are at the moment.

You look at our set-up, a lot of people will say we should be playing wing-backs. We’ve got one of the best managers in the world and we’ve just got to stick behind him and trust what he says and thinks. It’s all about opinions.

Huge week ahead

Rangers is the first one. They can’t slip up. No slip ups. They can’t let Ajax get back into it. We have to go to Rangers and get three points. Draw away at Ajax and then we’re alright, we’ll qualify.

It doesn’t matter if we’re first or second, Napoli are a great side. Just qualify. Get Rangers out of the way then you worry about City.

They’re a different class but we did them in the Community Shield. Some people don’t see it but that was no friendly. They were desperate to win it as much as we were. On our day we can beat them but we’re going to have to change things around massively.

To stop them scoring at the moment, we’d need two or three to stand any chance of winning the game. It’s a huge test but they’re not invincible.

They’re going to win the league, we all know that. Now it’s just by how many points. Arsenal will slip up, as will the teams around them.

We just have to make sure we can get in that top four by the end of the season and we can prove that we're capable of doing that by beating Man City.

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