A few months ago, Ian Wright, the former Arsenal striker, said something that bordered on heresy. He was assessing Salah’s influence on Liverpool, not long after the Egyptian had scored twice in a Premier League game against Leicester City. Something about his low center of gravity, Wright said, the way he controls the ball, the way he seems to cast it under his spell, reminded him of Lionel Messi.

Wright was, of course, immediately pilloried. Drawing a comparison between Messi — or Cristiano Ronaldo, for that matter — and any player is rightly taboo; such is the status of those two, that they do not measure themselves against their peers, but against only the greats of the past.

With a quiet insistence, though, more and more professional observers have followed Wright’s lead in recent weeks. Not to say that Salah is the equal of Messi — far from it — or that he has achieved, or might yet achieve, as much. It’s just that, in a certain light, at certain points, it is possible to glimpse in Salah a little of Messi’s afterglow.

Even as the idea has gained credence, it still seems fanciful. And yet, every three days or so, Salah does something to give the idea weight. Ordinarily, it is a goal, one of those mesmerizing dribbles that have long since been Messi’s hallmark. Against Roma, though, it was something else, something more significant. Great players win games — not single-handedly, but through sheer force fo personality. They bend and they shape contests to their will. Nobody does it better than Messi and Ronaldo. Against his old friends from Rome, though, Salah came close.