Sign up to FREE email alerts from Liverpool.com - The best LFC opinion Subscribe Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

You have to wonder if the Sadio Mané incident at Burnley earlier in the season, which was downplayed by all involved at the time, did really get to Mohamed Salah.

Accusations that Salah is a teensy, weensy bit too selfish have grown throughout the season. But the Salah of today is not the same as the one we saw back in August. Since the start of December, Salah has posted over half of an expected assist in six of Liverpool’s 11 games, after failing to register any such games in the league prior to that point.

Expected Assists (xA) offers an insight into the likelihood of a shot being scored by considering aspects such as difficulty and location, and it tends to provide an accurate summary of whether a player deserved an assist or not regardless of whether the shot that he generated was scored. Salah has never been an xA darling, but he's reached a level in the past few months that's unmatched through the rest of his career.

A picture tells a thousand words and all that. Here are the first four months of this season:

Here are Salah’s league games from Bournemouth away to Norwich away:

It’s a fairly drastic difference, and it's put him on track to have the best expected assist record of his career.

Salah still takes more shots per game than any Liverpool player, by a pretty dramatic difference. But that's now combined with a new-found sense of unselfishness in the final-third; he's making the right shoot-pass decision pretty much every time. Remember last year when Salah's production first trickled down from the other-wordily heights of 2017/18? Some wondered if he could ever re-capture that level again.

It's back now. In terms of expected goals and assists, Salah is back at the peak of his powers, a slight drop in his xG per 90 has been offset by the rise in xA. And Salah is contributing much, much more to the team's build-up play than he was in 2017/18, when he effectively served as an old-fashioned poacher, just one flying in off the left wing.

Klopp dabbling with stretches that see Salah take up the tip of the attack has meant he's had to drop deeper and become more of a creator, whether it's in a 4-3-3 with Firmino shifting over the right or Salah leading the line in a 4-2-3-1.

He's also had to subsume more of the creative burden as Liverpool have switched up from their fast-break attack to more of a controlled, possession-oriented style. That's a dynamic that's been a couple of seasons in the making, but it's become more of an imperative in the last couple of months. Liverpool have dropped their fullbacks a little deeper (partly by design, partly due to the new man-marking that the pair have been facing, partly to save legs). They've slowed their tempo for longer stretches. The team has spent less time delivering the ball from deep and spent more time trying to work the ball into the box.

Salah has been a big part of that adjustment. He's soaked up the creative load and delivered when the team has needed him most.

Accusations of selfishness have always been silly. Now, they're factually wrong.