Arsenal: Mohamed Salah was a non-factor unless gifted otherwise

It was nervy to consider Arsenal pitting Ainsley Maitland-Niles against Mohamed Salah, but the Egyptian did nothing to create for himself. It was a gift.

There were more than a few people talking about how Arsenal would be able to stifle the current Premier League top-scorer, Mohamed Salah. With the best potential candidate seemingly on the bench in Sead Kolasinac, it was up to Nacho Monreal and Ainsley Maitland-Niles.

And Arsene Wenger went with the kid.

But “the kid” was every bit the Egyptian’s equal, if not his superior. In every instance of them meeting face to face, Maitland-Niles won. He poked the ball away from a frustrated Salah more times than not and never let the Egyptian’s jukes and jives amount to anything.

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Yet, when you look at the numbers and see that Salah scored one, you may think that he went ahead and had his way with another shoddy defense. But that was simply not the case. Although, yes, the defense was shoddy.

Salah was not a world beater. I would even argue that he was largely a non-factor unless gifted otherwise. The opening goal was a result of piss-poor defending from Laurent Koscielny and Salah wasn’t even the primary instigator behind the ball going in.

Meanwhile, on Salah’s goal, it was ticketed straight for Petr Cech until a Shkodran Mustafi deflection sent it around the keepers hand and into the back of the net.

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He was frustrated. He created next to nothing for himself. All he did was take a few chomps out of gifts from a crap defense.

He was sloppy on the ball. Salah directly surrendered possession 10 times. That doesn’t include poor passes. That includes poor touches and having the ball stolen away from him. That was more than any other player on the pitch, including our maligned superstar Alexis Sanchez.

Why am I going out of my way to clarify that Salah didn’t actually eat our defense alive? Good question. Because I want it to be clear that our 20 year old central midfielder whose worst position is left back handled Liverpool’s best player. What happened around their individual confrontations was absolute madness, but in the theatre of that left corner flag, Ainsley Maitland-Niles emerged victorious.

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In a match where figuring out which defense could muff up the least, that has to count for something. Maybe nothing more than a passing point of pride, but I’ll take it. That game was painful at times and one of the few consolations I found, particularly in the first half, was that Salah was not beating us.