On whether changes to the squad have had an impact on Salah’s form…
It could. Not particularly maybe the right full-back, but it could [be], by the way, because maybe his whole Liverpool career he played with Trent [Alexander-Arnold], so it could. But, like you just said, he has been in promising positions often enough for him to score goals. Maybe with Trent even more, I don’t know, but I think in general for every player if you have quite a few changes in your squad during the summer then everyone needs to find new connections again and that normally goes like this a little bit.
Mo is not an exception to this because he’s also a human being like all the others, so it might have something to do with that, but yes, like you’ve seen now again, in an ideal world you play every single time with the same team [but] that’s not realistic for a team that plays every three days. Even if you would want to, it wasn’t possible because Jeremie Frimpong has been in and out with injuries a few times, Conor Bradley has been in and out with injuries, let alone [Alexis] Mac Allister missed out on pre-season and Alex [Isak]. So, I think it might be one of the reasons why we haven’t been as consistent as we were last season.
On making changes against Frankfurt and whether they came from having had time to assess the summer signings in training…
A bit of everything I would say. It was maybe also the first time there was an opportunity to play with both Alex and Hugo [Ekitike] because of Alex missing out for so long. We thought this was the first time he was ready to play twice in a row, so that is also an extra reason but yes, you always look at the opponent you face and against Frankfurt we thought, I thought, they might be a bit vulnerable in and around their centre-backs when it comes to pure speed.
If there is one thing you can say about Alex and Hugo it is they are fast, especially after seeing the first goal Hugo scored. I don’t think we did so many things different, the only thing we maybe changed was instead of playing with a nine and 10 behind each other they were closer to each other with two No.9s. We still had one winger on the left side with Cody Gakpo and our right winger, Florian Wirtz, who hardly played as a right winger and had more of a free role. Small margins I think were different. For the rest, I think we’ve mainly played similar to how we played last season with maybe the difference that certain players, certain new players, bring different characteristics.