Mo Salah is a great big baby tantrumming from a position on the floor

Sometimes things happen in football that call for very serious analysis and anything up to and including 16 entire conclusions.

Sometimes things happen in football that remind us not even football offers any escape from constant reminders that we’re living on the most cursed timeline and we have to write 600 words, many of which are f*ck, just for the cathartic release.

And sometimes things happen in football where you just have to laugh and, in your best Roy Keane voice, say: what a big baby.

Mo Salah’s BOMBSHELL performance in the Elland Road mixed zone fits firmly into that category.

Absolutely elite tantrumming from the Liverpool legend, it really was. It was always going to take something special this weekend to emerge as the biggest baby ahead of David Raya doing the full toddler-denied-sweets-at-the-supermarket four-limb-ground-pound response to Aston Villa’s late winner against Arsenal, but Salah achieved it magnificently.

Chief among the many problems with his astonishing rant, though, was the timing. Sure, he wheeled it out at a strategically weak time for Liverpool and their manager in order to inflict maximum damage. But also at a desperately weak time for himself. He really is not lashing out from a position of any strength here.

Fans and pundits have spent half this season wondering why he hasn’t been dropped, and nobody has been mystified to see him continue languishing on the bench since Arne Slot activated the nuclear option at West Ham.

He cannot seriously be at a loss as to why this has happened. His form this season has been miles off it, and he – understandably, to be fair – freewheeled home at the end of last season after the Premier League title was won. It really is a long time now since he’s been anywhere near his ridiculous best.

It’s not to say there hasn’t been a catastrophic breakdown in the relationship between player and club, but there’s not the clear answer to this particular chicken-and-egg quandary that Salah’s solipsism suggests. His removal from the Liverpool starting XI has not emerged to widespread bafflement from a clear blue sky.

And let’s look at the three games where he’s been benched. He never made it off the bench at West Ham, where Liverpool played well in his absence and could have won more handily than the 2-0 win they secured thanks to goals from Alexander Isak and Cody Gakpo.

He then came off the bench at half-time with Liverpool not playing at all well against Sunderland, and did two-fifths of bugger all to alter that state of affairs.

And he again remained on the bench throughout an astonishing game at Leeds where everything went right and then so very, very wrong so very, very fast that there wasn’t really time to stop and decide with any great conviction either way whether this required any Salah or not.

In summary, then: he has had a complete meltdown in front of journalists having been understandably dropped in the first place and understandably sparsely used as a sub since said dropping.

Beyond the general frustration and annoyance that you would hope and expect to see from any player left out of the team and a general sense of team frustration at the way things played out in that whirlwind second half at Leeds, what has he actually got to complain about? Not much, really.

He talks darkly of being thrown under the bus while gleefully chucking Arne Slot and the rest under an entire motorcade and has made the grievous error of allowing himself to be rattled into the shadow dimension by Jamie bloody Carragher.

This is not a healthy state of affairs for a bona-fide Barclays legend. He really shouldn’t be that arsed what Carragher says about him. More so when really none of it has been unreasonable.

Salah’s persecution complex is most readily apparent in his very arch and deliberate reference to Harry Kane, and the apparent difference in treatment they have received from the media here.

We think dropping Kane’s name was in part a cynical attempt to curry favour with Liverpool fans. There was a time, pre-Haaland, where Kane and Salah were without doubt the top two attacking players in the league and thus by tribal necessity a fierce debate raged over which of them was the bestest and which one a hopeless fraud. Because those are the only two options.

But it just doesn’t make any kind of sense to use him here. Kane is comfortably the most scrutinised (white) English footballer of his generation. A legit all-time great constantly told that Callum Wilson or Dominic Calvert-Lewin or Ollie Watkins or any number of other strikers not fit to lace his boots are coming for his England place.

He was a one-season wonder. He was Parry Pane. His August goal drought became an annual tradition. He was mocked repeatedly for his infamous allergy to silverware. He was told none of his goals for England actually counted. And all that is just by us, and we actually like him.

He remains the only Premier League player in history to have a TV wheeled into his post-match interview so he can be cross-examined live about an apparent ‘dive’.

His is, in short, a ludicrous name for Salah to drop if he wants sympathy for his own apparent unfair treatment under the media spotlight. And that’s before we even get into trying to work out when, exactly, Salah thinks Kane went 10 games without a goal.

We’re loathe to criticise players for coming out and saying interesting things to the media – and whatever else Salah’s self-pitying tirade was it was certainly that – when so much of it is generally so bland.

But you can be interesting without being quite so ludicrous, and without timing it so very badly.

At least bide your time, Mo. At least wait until you’ve stepped off the bench and made a decisive impact to change the course of a game. Do this when you’ve actually shown people how and why your treatment might not be entirely fair.

Because doing it now? From this uncomfortably weak position? Yeah, you just look like a big baby.