Salah delivers timely away haul in Double Gameweek of contrasting fortunes

West Ham United 0-2 Liverpool

• Goals: Mohamed Salah (£12.5m), Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (£6.2m)
• Assists: Divock Origi (£5.2m), Salah
• Bonus: Salah x3, Oxlade-Chamberlain x2, Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.6m) x1

Liverpool rounded off a predictably successful Double Gameweek 24 with a win over West Ham United on Wednesday night, a result that sent the Reds 19 points clear at the top of the Premier League.

Victories over Wolves and the Hammers added up to a fairly productive Gameweek for most of Liverpool’s Fantasy assets, too.

Of the 12 players who Jurgen Klopp used in his starting XIs at Molineux and the London Stadium, ten of them avoided a blank in at least one of the fixtures.

The exceptions were Georginio Wijnaldum (£5.4m) and, of course, Sadio Mane (£12.3m).

The injured Senegalese winger missed out on this latest success over David Moyes’ side and his sum contribution to the Double Gameweek 24 effort was a miserable one point, to the chagrin of his many owners and especially those who used the Triple Captain chip on him.

Mohamed Salah‘s (£12.5m) Gameweek 24 total of 16 points would have further rubbed salt into the wounds, such was the coin-toss nature of the captaincy decision for many FPL managers ahead of last Tuesday’s deadline.

The usual retrospective narratives will be applied in some quarters (Salah had the advantage of being on penalties, which gave him the edge etc) but it’s hard to legislate for a muscle strain picked up by Mane after half an hour in Wolverhampton, particularly as he had previously avoided any sort of meaningful injury in the whole of 2019/20.

Who knows what damage he could have inflicted on a limited West Ham side had he been fit enough to feature? And who could have predicted Salah would bank his highest FPL score in an away fixture since December 2018 in the same Gameweek?

We may not see Mane before the February winter break, with Klopp having said on Tuesday that the Senegal international would “probably not” play against Southampton in Gameweek 25.

There was no further comment from the Liverpool boss in his post-match press conference, unfortunately, with Klopp’s only injury update concerning Divock Origi (£5.2m), who limped off after 68 minutes in east London.

Klopp said:

Always when a player has to come off it’s a concern, especially when you play again three days later. But he told me it was cramps and let’s hope that it is like this and he should be ready again.

The win over West Ham was another exercise in patience for Liverpool fans and Fantasy managers alike, with the Reds encountering yet another team who were content on sitting back and soaking up pressure from Klopp’s side.

The Hammers, again operating with a five-man defence, largely did a satisfactory job for the first half an hour and Salah’s 34th-minute penalty was the visitors’ first shot on target.

Up until that point, Liverpool had got most of their joy when targeting teenage debutant Jeremy Ngakia (£4.0m) down West Ham’s right flank: Andrew Robertson (£7.0m) couldn’t quite finish off a Salah pass with the angle narrowing and soon after whipped an inviting ball across the six-yard box having again got behind the young right-back.

The breakthrough came when Issa Diop (£4.4m) clumsily felled Origi close to goal, allowing Salah the opportunity to score what was only his second away league goal on the season.

Liverpool’s deadlock-breaking strike forced West Ham out a little more and that played into the league leaders’ hands shortly after the interval, with Salah feeding Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain (£6.2m) to score the Reds’ second on the break.

There could have been further returns for the Egyptian in the final 20 minutes, with Salah nodding a Trent Alexander-Arnold (£7.6m) cross wide and then smashing the post with a curling effort from just outside the box.

After the injury concerns of autumn 2019, Salah looks back to his old self: energetic, dangerous and reassuringly profligate.

Roberto Firmino (£9.6m) couldn’t add to his goal at Molineux but came mightily close, forcing Lukasz Fabianski (£4.9m) into a superb low save just after half-time.

A superb piece of trickery on the West Ham byline went unrewarded a quarter of an hour later, with the Brazil international undermining his nimble footwork when slicing his shot well wide.

Liverpool’s defence recorded their seventh clean sheet in eight matches, meanwhile, although there were scares along the way.

Alisson (£6.1m) twice made smart stops from Declan Rice (£4.7m) in the second half, also thwarting a bobbling effort from Robert Snodgrass (£5.2m).

Manuel Lanzini‘s (£6.2m) scuffed attempt and Angelo Ogbonna‘s (£4.5m) off-target header ought to have tested the Liverpool shot-stopper, while Alexander-Arnold was inches away from ruining the visitors’ shut-out when crashing a clearance off his goalkeeper’s upright late on.

The luck that had arguably deserted the Reds’ backline in the first 15 Gameweeks of the season seems to be back, although Alisson and Joe Gomez’s (£5.2m) returns to the starting XI have also been huge factors in the increase in clean sheets.

Reflecting on a less-than-vintage display, Klopp said:

It was not a brilliant performance against a side which is insecure in the moment in the situation they are in. But for us on the other side, it makes it really difficult because a very important pattern in football is counter the counter. But for that the other team needs to have counters, and winning the ball back and then using the space. But we started pretty much each attack with a ball from a centre-half against nine or 10 or 11. 

I wish we would have done better but I take it like it is because if it would be easy to win this amount of games and have this number of points, so many other teams would have done it. It’s just really incredibly difficult.

The difficulty tonight was to get the rhythm, keep the rhythm and to stay concentrated. I think the biggest chances we gave them.

As we mentioned in our frisk of the Premier League fixture list, any Double Gameweek 24 punts on West Ham assets were surely short-term moves, given the unfavourable matches ahead.

Moyes’ troops look neither solid enough at the back nor sufficiently potent in attack to encourage investment at present, although the return of Fabianski is a huge positive and the influential Michail Antonio (£6.9m) may well have been spared this encounter in order to save him for the more winnable match against Brighton on Saturday.

Speaking ahead of the match, Moyes said of Antonio’s absence:

He’s still feeling his hamstring a little bit and obviously we need him back but we can’t take any more risks, so he misses out tonight.

The Hammers at least had a go at their visitors in the second half and had kept them at bay in the opening 30 minutes, with Moyes highlighting the positives in his post-match presser:

I thought the players did a good job defensively. Especially giving a debut to a young right-back as well. Look, we were playing against a really good team, we made opportunities, more in the second half and gave us some chances.

Overall pleased with the performance up against a tough team, we are a bit limited to what we can do as well so we made the most of what we could.

I think the players will feel that in lots of things tonight it was positive. Tactically organised, disciplined when they had to be and some of the defenders stood up to good challenges tonight. Organisational wise I thought they dealt well with things that Liverpool caused them.

Any thoughts that Ngakia could become a regular £4.0m starting defender were slightly dampened by Moyes, who said:

I wanted to give Zabaleta a breather, he’s played a lot of games and we need to look after him with the games coming up as well.

Moyes added that new signing Tomas Soucek would come into his thoughts for Gameweek 25, saying that the midfielder had “had a winter break so hopefully he is fresh and ready to go”.

West Ham United XI (5-4-1): Fabianski; Ngakia, Diop, Ogbonna, Cresswell, Masuaku; Noble, Rice, Snodgrass, Lanzini (Fornals 69′); Haller.

Liverpool XI (4-3-3): Alisson; Alexander-Arnold (Keita 78′), Van Dijk, Gomez, Robertson; Oxlade-Chamberlain (Jones 85′), Henderson, Wijnaldum; Firmino, Salah, Origi (Fabinho 69′).

Members Analysis

As part of our Members Articles Unlocked week, the analysis below – normally behind the paywall – is available for non-subscribers to read.

The average position maps above (West Ham left, Liverpool right) show just how advanced Robertson was in the visitors’ set-up, with the Scottish left-back (number 26) further forward than any of the Hammers’ starters.

Origi (number 27) took up Mane’s left-wing role, with both he and Salah (number 11) often pushing on in advance of the roaming Firmino (number 9).

Salah topped the table for goal attempts, with only Firmino able to match his seven penalty box touches on Wednesday.

The Egyptian racked up six shots against Wolves, too, taking his total to 11 in Gameweek 24 alone – although only one of those, his penalty against West Ham, was deemed a big chance.

Sebastien Haller (£7.0m) didn’t register a single goal attempt against Liverpool or Leicester, with his combined expected goal involvement (xGI) of 0.10 underlining just how starved of service he has been in Gameweek 24.

Salah’s cause on the Bonus Points System was helped no end by the fact that the two key passes he supplied led to big chances.

Alexander-Arnold chipped in with two key passes, as well, helping him to a bonus point: no FPL defender has more of those than the Liverpool right-back this season.