Mohamed Salah has revealed a more tender side in how he cares for Liverpool’s fledgling stars and underlined how their mental approach is paramount to progress.
The 31-year-old is primed to continue his comeback from a hamstring injury against Sparta Prague at Anfield on Thursday night with an eye on starting Sunday’s crunch FA Cup tie against Manchester United.
A number of Liverpool’s talented youngsters are expected to be given another run-out against Sparta and Salah has watched their emergence with keen interest, becoming one of their biggest cheerleaders and a mentor for advice.
‘The main point is try to talk to them and show you really care about them before you give advice,’ said the Liverpool striker.
‘If you just give out advice, without showing that player you really care about them, they wouldn’t really listen. But, if you show you really care a lot about him and tell him he can achieve big things, that he can be great in there, that he just needs to do a small thing to change it, then that can work.
‘He’s a human being so he isn’t going to change everything in one day. So the most important thing for me is to show the player that I really care about them – which I do – then after that it’s easy to communicate, it’s easy to get them under your arm and just keep talking to them.’
Salah, a self-confessed chess addict, who admits using the pastime he plays seven to eight times a day to strategise against defences, stressed the one piece of advice he wished he had received as an 18-year-old was ‘to work harder mentally’ and insists that side of the game is more difficult than the physical.
‘I work in the gym almost every day for one and a half hours. Sometimes I go home and work again but it’s so hard to keep working on your mental side. I do 15 minutes every day,’ revealed Salah.
‘It’s tricky, really tricky, trust me. I’ve been doing it for a few years. You sit with yourself alone for 15 minutes before you sleep or when you wake up. It’s much harder than one and a half hours in the gym because your mind is going everywhere.
‘It’s about things you want to achieve or situations you want to experience. You need to trick your brain, to lie to yourself, so your brain can’t tell the difference between the real thing or fake. You keep going in the process until you believe the idea.
‘You visualise your goals before they happen. Ninety percent of my goals or even more are because of that.’
Talking to the Men In Blazers podcast, Salah pinpointed the hunger in the current squad as a driving force behind Liverpool’s bid for a quadruple trophy haul this season.
‘The players are very hungry, we have good chance to win everything, we just need to give it a proper try because we have nothing to lose, just give it a try.
‘I love the whole squad. The players are really into their football, they want to achieve big things and they ask a lot of questions. I love when they ask a question because that means they really want to learn something and that’s key for me.’
