Salah-brating a true legend

For the best part of a decade, Mohamed Salah has been one of the Premier League’s greatest players.

Sometimes breathtaking, often unplayable, but more than anything else, relentlessly reliable. He has delivered for Liverpool week after week, match after match, goal after goal.

Now the little Egyptian wizard has announced he will leave Anfield at the end of the season and he will do so as one of the club’s all-time greats.

His record speaks for itself. Over 200 goals, more than 80 assists, three Golden Boots and a medal cabinet that includes the Premier League, Champions League, FA Cup, League Cup and Club World Cup.

That’s not just consistency, that’s elite-level output over a sustained period.

For years, he has been the definition of dependable brilliance. You knew what was coming, defenders knew what was coming, and it still didn’t make a difference. Time and time again he produced the goods.

This season, though, ties between club and player have become strained. In a way it felt like a relationship where both sides knew it was over but neither had the courage to end it and were just going through the motions. Mo’s performances dipped and so did the club’s unwavering love for him.

And then it escalated.

That moment where he spoke about being made a scapegoat didn’t come out of nowhere. It felt like the sort of line that builds over time, when frustrations have been simmering and neither side quite knows how to reset things. When it gets to that stage, it’s usually a sign that the end is not just coming, but overdue.

It felt like a relationship where both sides knew it was over but neither had the courage to end it

Which is why part of me thinks the perfect goodbye was probably last summer. Walk away at the absolute peak, leave everyone wanting more, ride off into the sunset with the orchestra still playing. Instead, we have had a slightly more awkward final act. Not enough to damage the legacy, but enough to dull the shine just a touch. He will almost certainly head to either the US or Saudi Arabia next, where the money is bigger and the expectations considerably smaller. Fair enough. He has earned a golden semi-retirement.

But if he fancies something a little more glamorous, a little more challenging and infinitely more character-building, I’m sure we could make some space for him in the players’ car park at Bramall Lane for a season or two.

Surviving the ugly way

I realise I may increasingly be in a minority but I still don’t think Tottenham Hotspur are going down.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t like to see it happen – a falling giant like that always makes for a bit of entertainment as we get to watch a big boy slumming it with us lesser clubs outside the Premier.

But despite all the evidence to the contrary, I still don’t see it happening.

This is not me pretending things are fine, because they clearly aren’t. Spurs have not won a league game in 2026, they are hovering just above the bottom three, and that defeat to Nottingham Forest felt like one of those results that you look back on as a pivotal relegation moment.

And yet, for all of that, I still think they will find a way to survive.

Not by suddenly rediscovering their identity or playing their way out of trouble, but by doing what struggling big teams always end up doing – picking up points when they don’t really deserve them. One ugly win, a couple of dirty draws, maybe a moment of ridiculous fortune when they need it most, and suddenly a gap opens up. It won’t be pretty or convincing, but it rarely is at the ugly end of the table.

Whether this survival happens under Igor Tudor or someone else is the only real question. If the club were going to act, the obvious moment was straight after that Forest defeat, giving a new manager time to settle before the trip to Sunderland on April 12.

The fact they didn’t suggests they may well stick with him and hope he can drag them over the line. Personally, I think their chances of survival would be greatly enhanced if they asked Harry Redknapp to ride to the rescue. It would add another dimension to this story.

But I suspect they won’t, because nothing shouts “we cocked up getting rid of Postecoglou, then we cocked up again getting rid of Frank, and then we cocked up again bringing in Igor” quite as loudly as dragging an 80-year-old out of retirement to undo all those cock-ups.

The final thought on this Spurs tale has to be about Tudor the man, not the manager.

At the end of the Forest match he walked off that pitch to a chorus of boos and anger from fans, which is not entirely unexpected or even unjustified giving what had just happened.

But what those fans didn’t know at that time was that Igor had just learned that his father had passed away.

It is difficult to imagine what that must feel like, standing there in the middle of all that hatred when something far more important has just changed in your world.

Football matters, of course it does. We spend half our lives proving that it does. But moments like that are a stark reminder that football is never the most important thing.

Compared to the health and happiness of your family and loved ones, it’s just background noise.

When 147 is just not enough

Ask anyone on the street what the maximum break in snooker is and most will tell you 147.

It’s one of those numbers that just exists, lodged somewhere in the brain whether you follow the sport or not.

Ronnie O’Sullivan, though, has never really done limits. And he proved it last week by making a break of 153.

For those of you who aren’t aware, snooker has a slightly odd loophole where, after a foul, you can be given a free ball. That lets you treat any ball as a red and effectively sneak in an extra scoring opportunity before a break gets going.

If that foul and free ball combo happens at the beginning of a frame before anything has been potted then it does, by definition, mean the maximum break increases to 155.

It’s rare, it’s messy, and most players wouldn’t get anywhere near making the most of it.

But Ronnie, obviously, did.

What I have always liked about O’Sullivan is that he makes the exceptional look almost casual. Ronnie has always played as if the game belongs to him a little more than it belongs to everyone else. Give him half a chance, a sliver of an opening and a table worth attacking and suddenly even snooker’s most famous number became negotiable.

That is why he is still the standard by which everyone else is judged. He is not quite the unstoppable force he was 10 or 15 years ago, when frames vanished in no time and opponents were left polishing their cues. But he can still produce moments nobody else would even think of, never mind pull off. And that, more than any other stat, is why he remains the greatest the game has ever seen.

In theory, someone one day might make the full 155. Everything will have to fall perfectly into place for it to happen.

In reality, unless it’s Ronnie playing that game, you shouldn’t hold your breath.

E-mail: jamescalvertmalta@gmail.com

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