Salah has fallen – which ten other apparent Premier League undroppables could be next? | OneFootball

Arne Slot finally bowed to the inevitable and dropped a misfiring, underperforming Mo Salah from his Premier League starting XI at the weekend.

And the Liverpool boss was instantly rewarded with victory (albeit a victory carrying a powerful West Ham caveat) which prompted us to wonder which other misfiring, underperforming regulars around the Premier League should be far more droppable than they apparently are.

We set ourselves what was in hindsight a quite stupidly restrictive benchmark of 10 Premier League starts, which does mean some of these end up being quite harsh.

But the point is to be looking at apparent undroppables who perhaps shouldn’t be quite so undroppable; doesn’t really work if they aren’t in fact starting nearly all the games, does it? At least try to bear that in mind before getting all angried up below the fold, yeah?

Guglielmo Vicario (Tottenham)

Just an endlessly fascinating goalkeeper but one who probably does need withdrawing from the limelight for a bit, for his own good as much as anything else.

We didn’t particularly care for the spectacle of his own fans – and not a small minority, either – booing him after his absolute catastrof*ck against Fulham. But that explosion of frustration and anger had been bubbling up over the course of an increasingly error-riddled season.

The thing with Vicario is that the saves he makes are often logic-defyingly outstanding. Put him in a situation where a striker has the ball six yards in front of him with nobody else around, and you can back Vicario confidently to do something absurd to keep the ball out of his goal.

But send a shot vaguely towards the middle of the net from 20-odd yards, and as often as not he’ll make it look absolutely unstoppable.

And that’s before the Fulham unpleasantness. Wherever you stand on Vicario, what he absolutely is not, for better or worse, is a keeper who goes unnoticed. And for so many reasons he just feels far more of an Angeball keeper than a Frankball one.

The problem here is that his understudy Antonin Kinsky is basically a younger, less experienced Vicario clone. So we don’t really know what to suggest.

Lucas Paqueta (West Ham)

West Ham have been largely rotten this season, the tentative signs of life in recent weeks under Nuno Espirito Santo washed away by an inexplicably and pretty much indefensibly soporific and passive display against a Liverpool team absolutely there to be got at.

Paqueta is far from alone in underperforming for the Hammers this season, but as a senior pro getting a second chance many thought he would never get, you’d like to see a bit more than we’ve seen so far.

And that was before Not Contributing Much gave way to Active Sabotage against Liverpool as utter and complete headloss saw him talk his way into two yellow cards in the space of a minute.

It was already wearying enough for a player with Paqueta’s history to have got himself suspended for collecting five bookings in the space of seven games; to then get himself so pointlessly and needlessly suspended again immediately on his return is just unforgivable.

Ollie Watkins (Aston Villa)

Eleven Premier League starts, each of them lasting at least 67 minutes. Two chunky half-hourish cameos off the bench in Villa’s other games. And still only the one single, solitary goal to show for it despite Villa’s general resurgence.

Funny thing is that the one goal he did score might be the single most significant, sliding-doors goal anyone has scored this season anywhere.

It might not have helped Watkins himself, it turns out, but it has thoroughly transformed the trajectory of Villa’s season.

Before that goal, Villa were winless through five games. The goal they’d scored in a disappointing 1-1 draw at 10-man Sunderland the previous weekend was the only one they’d managed in five limp efforts.

And then they found themselves 1-0 down at home to Fulham on matchday six with an entire season – an entire project – seemingly circling the drain.

But from nowhere, Watkins lifted a shot over Bernd Leno to bring Villa level. They went on to win 3-1, and have won six of seven Premier League matches since.

The cruellest of ironies indeed that this transformative goal has done two-fifths of f*ck all for the fortunes of the scorer himself.

Virgil van Dijk (Liverpool)

Salah has fallen. Could the other grand pillar of Modern Liverpool really be next?

It does feel wholly unsustainable for Slot to persist with his present course of simply having the visibly creaking 34-year-old play every single minute of every single game in both the Premier League and Champions League.

It should be noted that most of Van Dijk’s Liverpool career has been spent under the weight of such demands, and in his prime, in his absolute pomp, it was a responsibility and workload in which he clearly and demonstrably revelled.

But we are no longer talking about Absolute Pomp Van Dijk. And he looks awful tired.

Luke Shaw (Man United)

The biggest beneficiary of United’s European failure and Carabao humiliation, with the resulting one-game-a-week schedule allowing the oft-brittle Shaw to start every Premier League game this season in his now familiar left-of-the-back-three position.

But that record is about to collide head on with the Busy Festive Period, the glorious month of December in which even titchy little clubs like United with no other competitions to worry about find themselves facing another game every three or four days and no real clue who they’ll be playing from one game to the next and then also playing the same team twice in the space of about a fortnight for some reason.

Can Shaw really continue to be relied upon in every game? The extreme levels of weariness on display against the 10 men of Everton last week rather suggest not.

Morgan Gibbs-White (Nottingham Forest)

Let’s be entirely fair about it; this one would have been far more valid a month ago than it is now. In a way, the sight of a previously struggling Gibbs-White scoring in three straight games should perhaps make us rethink this entire feature. Maybe they all just need more time. But we’re not doing that. We are not in the business of learning things here.

None of the other players on this list have Gibbs-White’s mitigation, for one thing, of starting the season on the back of a deeply bizarre summer in which he thought he was joining Tottenham (lucky escape etc. and so forth ho ho ho) only to then sign a new contract announced in a video alongside Mr Marinakis that definitely wasn’t unsettling or strange at all.

The recent goals have coincided with Forest’s recent resurgence under Sean Dyche, but they do still also mask to some extent a significant reduction in Gibbs-White’s role as this team’s creative spark. Having hit double figures for assists last season, he has just one to his name so far in this campaign.

Marcos Senesi (Bournemouth)

Perhaps the clearest indicator of the difference between Bournemouth last season and Bournemouth this season is the fact Senesi has already racked up more Premier League minutes in 25/26 (1158) than in the entirety of 24/25 (1107).

He’s not been bad, per se, it’s just that as the one constant in a defence that has now shipped 12 goals in four winless games, it does start to draw attention. Feels like maybe it’s time to try something else.

And Andoni Iraola has no choice now anyway; the defeat at Sunderland from 2-0 up was disastrous for many reasons, but disciplinary chaos was high on the list. For the second Premier League game in a row, Senesi picked up a booking in injury-time, taking him to the five-card suspension threshold which will see him join Lewis Cook and David Brooks on the naughty step for the midweek Everton game.

Veljko Milosavljevic, this is your time to shine.

Alex Iwobi (Fulham)

So anonymous even in the impressive victory at Tottenham that Spurs fans didn’t even remember to boo him for being Arsenal. In fairness they were a bit preoccupied booing their own players, but they did still remember when Emile Smith Rowe came on. And Emile Smith Rowe has sadly become a byword for anonymous.

Iwobi has started every single game for Fulham this season as he closes in on reaching the 100 Premier League appearances landmark for a third top-flight club, but hasn’t contributed either a goal or assist since the 3-1 win over Brentford in September, which is eight games ago now.

Joao Gomes (Wolves)

Harsh and vindictive to single Joao Gomes out, but Wolves are at the stage where trying almost anything they haven’t already attempted feels like it doesn’t really have any significant downside. What’s the worst thing that can actually happen next to a team with two points from 13 games?

Basically, nobody wants to be the player with the most minutes in a side that has lost 11 Premier League games before the advent calendars come out. You do start to look like a bit of an albatross, even if that’s not really very fair.

Statistically, though, the evidence suggests that instead of dropping Gomes, Rob Edwards should actually make him captain. Wolves’ points per game rockets from 0.15 all the way up to 1.00 when Gomes has the armband. Although one game is admittedly a small sample size.

Jayden Bogle (Leeds)

And again. Is this particularly fair? No. But have Leeds lost six of their last seven Premier League games meaning that at this time only Wolves are less sh*t? Yes.

So we’re once again in ‘can’t really make things worse’ territory. There are three contenders in the Leeds squad and our airily dismissive snap judgement is that Bogle has been less good than Joe Rodon and they’ve already tried leaving Gabriel Gudmundsson out in the Man City game, with, well, quite confusing results given he came on just after Leeds had somehow got that game back to 2-2.

But that ultimately futile comeback after leaving out a previous ever-present surely only shows proof of concept for trying it again, doesn’t it? Against a team that maybe isn’t Man City? When you need a tenth name for a feature: yes, yes it does.