Paul Gorst reveals what Mo Salah said to him just before Liverpool winger’s explosive tirade | OneFootball

Paul Gorst has revealed what Mo Salah had told him in the Elland Road mixed zone just a few minutes before his extraordinary public tirade after Liverpool’s 3-3 draw at Leeds on Saturday.

That was the third consecutive game in which the Egyptian was omitted from the Reds’ starting XI, and he didn’t feature at all in two of those, with the winger going on to claim that he now has ‘no relationship’ with Arne Slot and that some people at the club have ‘thrown me under the bus’.

The 33-year-old’s comments have since prompted plenty of feedback, with Jamie Carragher branding his words a ‘disgrace’, and the player has subsequently been left out of the LFC squad for tonight’s Champions League clash against Inter Milan.

Gorst reveals what Salah told him just before public tirade

Gorst appeared on The Wayne Rooney Show on Monday in light of Salah’s explosive outburst at the weekend, and the Liverpool Echo reporter – who Lewis Steele identified as the man to convince the Egyptian to ‘stop and talk’ – spoke of a brief exchange between him and the player shortly before the latter bared his soul to the world.

The journalist said: “He [Salah] walked past and I said to him, as I do most weeks, ‘Mo, have you got two minutes?’. 99 times out of 100, it’s normally just, ‘Not today’ and a little bit of a grin. It’s a bit of a running joke with myself on the patch because he does it every week.

“He said to me, ‘I’m just gonna get a shower and I’ll be back’, and I wasn’t sure whether that was being sarcastic because he hadn’t played.

“You know, was it a bit of a dig – why would he have had a shower because he was on the bench – but I decided to wait it out and after 10 or 15 minutes he comes back and there was maybe half a dozen of us who were there ready to chat to him.”

(Photo by Lewis Storey/Getty Images)

Salah gave himself time to reflect before his public comments

It’d appear from Gorst’s anecdote that Salah’s public comments weren’t an off-the-cuff rant, but rather a calculated message to the wider world about the frustration he’s feeling at Liverpool.

That he said what he said even after giving himself time to reflect indicates just how angry he feels right now, and one can only imagine what he might’ve uttered into microphones and voice recorders had he stopped straight away and let loose.

As the journalist referenced, it’s notably rare for the Egyptian to stop and speak with reporters in the mixed zone after a match; and when he does so, he tends to have something headline-grabbing to say rather than just trotting out clichéd platitudes.

The timing of Salah’s tirade might have been far from ideal amid such an atrocious season for Liverpool, and in the immediate aftermath of a horrific collapse at Leeds, but that shouldn’t detract from what a legendary figure he’s been at Anfield.

What happens next is unclear, and that uncertainty will be frightening for Reds supporters, but we can only hope and pray that he and Slot can work through their apparent differences and at least re-establish a somewhat cordial relationship.

It just wouldn’t be right for one of our greatest-ever players to be tossed out the back door over a searingly honest but ill-judged interview.