Mohamed Salah’s goalscoring heroics must make him Ballon d'Or contender, insists Liverpool teammate Dejan Lovren

Dejan Lovren believes Mohamed Salah’s extraordinary debut season at Liverpool means he must now be considered as a rival to Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo for this year’s Ballon d’Or.

Salah scored his 42nd and 43rd goals of a remarkable campaign in Tuesday’s 5-2 Champions League semi-final defeat of Roma, the club he left to join Liverpool last summer.

The Egyptian, who was crowned the PFA’s Player of the Year on Sunday, is now just four goals away from matching Ian Rush’s record for the most in a single Liverpool season.

When asked whether Salah could now be thought of as a superstar, Lovren said: “Yes, he is the one. He is becoming the superstar.

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“It looks easy what he does but it is very difficult. Maybe I couldn’t look into the future in pre-season and think he could do this. But how he was working, how he wants the ball… he is just a different player.

“We help him, the manager helps and this style of play helps him a lot. He didn’t play that style before Basel, Chelsea, Roma. They had different styles and this style suits him perfectly, hopefully he will just stay injury free and that is the most important thing.

“If he continues like that – I don’t know if this is the right time to put pressure on him – but I believe he should be regarded as one of the best three in the world at the end of the year. He deserves how he is doing right now. He deserves to be mentioned for the ball, Ballon d’Or. When people talk about Messi and Ronaldo they should also talk about Salah.

“He deserves the credit but I think he deserves even more to be honest. 43 goals guys, f****** hell. 43 goals, f****** hell.”

Liverpool appeared to be assured of a place in next month’s Kiev final when Salah’s brace was followed by another from Roberto Firmino and a Sadio Mané strike, but late lapses in concentration allowed Roma to score two useful away goals.

The Italians are now hoping for a repeat of the quarter-final heroics that eliminated Barcelona. Another 3-0 win in Rome will be enough to progress on away goals, while a 4-1 victory would also suffice.

Lovren was as frustrated as Jurgen Klopp and the rest of his team-mates that Liverpool handed their visitors a lifeline, but the potency of Salah, Firmino and Mané means he is not worried by the prospect of a historic turnaround.

“Even with [Roma’s comeback] I am still confident that we can score there,” he said. “We had so many chances, they are really open, they are a team that likes to play and that is good for us. They now need to score.

“It will be a crazy atmosphere but we played in one similar at Man City [in the quarter-final] and we know what we need to do. If we score quite early, I think it will be a quite different.

“I am really quite confident we will have chances again like today. With our attack, how we did it, I am not even worried.”

“We are not Barcelona. We play different football to Barca. We are a team who will not think about these five goals that we scored today,” Lovren added. “We will go there like a 0-0 game and we know we have these 90 minutes to make history again. We know what we need to do.”

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