Ryan Gravenberch gets dream back-up shirt number as Salah loyalty bizarrely questioned

Ryan Gravenberch has always dreamed of wearing Jon Flanagan’s old Liverpool shirt while one writer gets confused about that Mo Salah transfer.

One foot in the Graven
There has been much consternation over the last month about Liverpool having a hole in their midfield but thank the lord, they seem to have found a solution in Ryan Gravenberch.

And now – thanks to the never-knowingly-under-shithoused Mirror – we can reveal exactly why the Dutchman has chosen Liverpool over any of his other options:

Ryan Gravenberch’s dream shirt number available ahead of Liverpool transfer

And it turns out that his ‘dream shirt number’ is 38 despite – and this seems important – the No. 8 being the shirt he actually chose at Ajax and for the Netherlands Under-21 side.

Yes, he has worn the No. 38 for Bayern Munich but that was presumably because Leon Goretzka was firmly ensconced in the No. 8. It’s more his ‘back-up shirt number’ than his ‘dream shirt number’.

And yet we are supposed to believe that this Liverpool No.38 shirt (last worn by convicted domestic abuser Jon Flanagan) is ‘an added extra’ that the club will be able to offer Gravenberch as ‘a sweetener’.

Call Mediawatch old-fashioned but we suspect that massive wages and the chance to play first-team football might be the actual lure.

Volumes of nonsense
Elsewhere, the Mirror tell us that ‘Erik ten Hag’s comments on Ryan Gravenberch speak volumes as Jurgen Klopp wins transfer race’.

As ‘speak volumes’ literally means ‘convey a great deal without using words’, no comments can actually ‘speak volumes’.

Not that such details will stop anybody pretending that Ten Hag being pretty nice about his own Ajax player nearly 18 months ago is now news.

Saving secret Ryan
Obviously the Liverpool Echo is right on the Gravenberch train, and they spoke to Bild man Christian Falk, who is very keen on the sound of his own voice so was more than willing to talk.

It sounds pretty bombastic when put through the Echo hype machine:

Ryan Gravenberch ‘secret talks’, Harry Kane help and how Liverpool struck deal

Does Falk ever mention ‘secret talks’? Does he balls. Sorry, ‘balls’, because it seems you can put anything you want in quote marks now.

And how did Harry Kane ‘help’? By acting as a go-between? By telling Gravenberch that ‘this means more’ at Liverpool?

No, Kane ‘helped’ by costing a metric sh*t-tonne of money so Bayern Munich had to sell Gravenberch to buy another midfielder. Thanks, Harry. Means a lot.

And then there’s this:

Ryan Gravenberch might have saved Liverpool overpaying £52m on transfers this summer

Well, strictly speaking, Moises Caicedo and Romeo Lavia saved Liverpool overpaying £52m on transfers by choosing to join Chelsea instead.

Salah days
On the subject of Liverpool, Ian Ladyman is taking on a massive straw man in the Daily Mail.

Loyalty gets you nowhere in football, so why should Mohamed Salah stay at Liverpool?

Well, the obvious answer to that question is ‘he doesn’t get to choose unless Liverpool decide to sell’, but Ladyman is not for such minor details, for he is very keen to draw parallels between the way that Tottenham have chosen to discard their unwanted players and the loyalty supposedly demanded of Salah.

I would like to believe that good men and women will always be treated well but I would be wrong about that if I did. So why should Mo Salah stay at Liverpool? Why should he turn down the riches on offer in Saudi Arabia that have thus far proved too great for Riyad Mahrez, Aleksandar Mitrovic and Jordan Henderson to say no to?

Is anybody saying he should turn them down? The pertinent question is not whether he would leave but whether Liverpool should sell him. That’s the first part of this equation. And if Liverpool decide they will accept £100m-plus for Salah, then of course the Egyptian owes them nothing. He literally cannot leave unless Liverpool allow him to leave.

What makes Salah so special that he must live by a different code and adhere to a different set of principles?

Nothing. You’re being weird now.

Ideally, the Egyptian should not leave in this window simply because we are so close to the end of it. Liverpool and their manager Jurgen Klopp would have no time left to find a replacement. That feels wrong. But to expect Salah, at 31, to extend more than what is simply decent courtesy towards his employer is unrealistic.

Liverpool and their manager Jurgen Klopp would have no room for complaint because they would have agreed to the transfer. This feels like such an obvious point and yet Ladyman is wilfully ignoring it. That feels wrong.

Since joining in 2017 from Roma, Salah has helped Liverpool win every trophy available to him. He has kept his part of the deal and more while the Liverpool squad has become weaker around him.

In a perfect world he would care about his legacy and his place in the hearts and minds of Liverpool supporters. He would want his face on a banner on the Kop for ever more.

Salah probably does ‘care about his legacy’ and might well have his ‘face on a banner on the Kop for ever more’. No sane Liverpool fan would blame him for taking the Saudi Arabian money if Liverpool took it themselves. That banner would remain alongside those saying ‘FSG out’.

Mind you, this is the man who then writes that selling Cole Palmer to Chelsea means that Manchester City do not see them as rivals. Did he write the same this time last year when City twice did business with Arsenal?