Mo Salah, Liverpool’s kangaroo, looks ready to bounce through winter slog

Just past the half hour at a chilly, angsty Anfield Mo Salah was suddenly free in space on the edge of the Napoli box, scampering in on goal in that bouncy style, hair flapping, legs whirring like a cartoon kangaroo. Salah had time to look up and nudge a weak, doomed pass across the six yard box in the vague direction of Sadio Mané. There was a groan around the seats, but a quiet one. The one thing people here know for sure about Salah is that he just keeps going. Some footballers are relentless in a pained kind of way, tied to the rack, teeth clenched, head down. Salah has a lightness to him. He keeps coming because he knows in the end the space will open, that his ability to glide and spring sideways with preternatural snap will find the right sliver of space.

It didn’t take long. Two minutes late James Milner fed a quick pass in to his feet in the same position. Salah took the ball on the move, veering away from Mário Rui like a speed-skater. Then came the moment that made the moment, a piece of embroidery so cleverly conceived you could easily miss it, could easily fail to understand why Kalidou Koulibaly suddenly stopped, reduced to a man stumbling through a reed-strewn pond in a pair of outsized fishing waders by Salah’s high speed feint.

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With a wave of noise already beginning to break from the far Kop end Salah clipped the ball hard and low past David Ospina without breaking his stride. And it turns out it really is quite useful to have a player of such easy grace on a tense night such as this. From a mix-and-match opening half hour fraught with dead ends and frustration at the referee Liverpool were 1-0 up and the game, the night, the group, was sliding their way.

It was a significant moment in Salah’s own drama too; and an indication of what might yet be to come through the slog of winter. Salah’s focus has narrowed in recent weeks, although it turns out a jaded second-season Salah is still good enough to be the Premier League’s top scorer so far.

There is one thing though. Since his injury Salah had yet to produce a scoring performance against genuinely strong opponents. Since the Champions League semi against Roma his goals had been scored against West Ham, Brighton (twice), Southampton, Huddersfield, Red Star Belgrade, Cardiff, Fulham, Watford and Bournemouth. In the same period he had failed to score against Chelsea, Real Madrid, Tottenham, PSG (twice), Chelsea (twice), Napoli, Manchester City and Arsenal.

It was coming, though. He’d still looked wonderfully fearless, always with his head up, feet still possessed with that weird creative magic. And from the start here it seemed like he might make the difference. Anfield was rocking before kick-off on a breezy, finger-numbing night. Those Magical European Nights we hear so much about: sometimes cliché is no less true for being a cliché. It is a part of football’s beauty that for all the commodification this remains a deeply emotional game. And as ever the Kop was a shared pageantry of flags and banners, that single tier stretching right up into the eaves of the roof to create a noise-funnel effect the length of the pitch.

After the defeat in Paris there had been a conviction Liverpool would return to their most aggressive base style for a home game they had to win. Although once again Jürgen Klopp had picked his three sturdiest workhorses in Milner, Jordan Henderson and Georginio Wijnaldum, the midfield equivalent of being marched three times around a pub car park in a headlock. In Paris that trio had been outmanoeuvred by slicker, cuter opponents. Here the job was quite simple, to stand toe-to-toe and create the orderly disorder on which that front three likes to feed.

As for Napoli the plan was to still the early fury and take the game deep. The steamrollering Allan would be key to this, a compellingly muscular presence in those spaces between the lines. In Naples Salah had spent most of the game in Allan’s big pocket. It worked for a while too. Napoli pressed high in their spiffy-looking turquoise and lime green kit.

The crowd began to fret a little. At a break in play Henderson and Virgil Van Dijk could be seen exchanging heated words, pointing towards the corner. And time and again Liverpool punted the ball diagonally across the pitch towards the Napoli left-back zone, a pre-hatched plan to find that Salah-space in behind Rui.

Salah’s first glimpse of goal had come on that side, a horribly casual touch right in front of goal after a fine run from Andy Robertson. The man who keeps on keeping on had twice been muscled out of things by Koulibaly before the third time, and that vital moment just outside the six-yard box. This was not quite the roaring, searing, crowd-driven evisceration some had hoped for. But for Salah, and for Liverpool’s measured, slow-burn season, it might be just as significant.