Mohamed Salah has spoke out on his Liverpool team-mates’ chess skills, and says he is the best by far at Anfield when it comes to the far less high-intensity game.
Liverpool hero Mohamed Salah has cheekily claimed he’s the top chess player at Anfield – leaving his team-mates in checkmate.
The Egyptian ace, famed for his slick moves on the pitch, has confessed to a new addiction not content with just dribbling past defenders, he’s now into outsmarting them in chess as well, the Mirror reports.
Salah, who’s been smashing goals left, right and centre for the Reds, admits he’s hooked on the game, playing up to eight matches daily. “The way I’m addicted to chess is insane,” he revealed.
“I play almost every day, not less than seven or eight games and sometimes more. I don’t know if it develops something in my game or not, but it makes you think strategically.”
When it comes to chess, Salah reckons he’s got the edge over his Liverpool mates, especially Trent Alexander-Arnold. “I just love to play chess. Trent [Alexander-Arnold] plays, but I’m the best by far. There’s no-one in the team who can be close. I’m serious. I’m not being arrogant, but the rest are really bad, all of them.”
Despite a rare off night against Sheffield United where he was subbed off early, Salah’s stats are still impressive: 22 goals and 12 assists in 34 appearances this season. That’s involvement in a goal every time he’s on the field and get this he visualises nearly all his goals before they happen.
“There are a lot of things to think about, a lot of things you want to achieve and a lot of situations you want to experience before it happens, so when it happens, you’re not surprised, you feel you’ve had that experience,” he said, ahead of Thursday’s clash.
The forward has spilled the beans on his mental magic tricks that keep him scoring goals. “Sometimes you need to trick your brain to just lie to yourself so your brain doesn’t make a difference between the real thing or a fake thing. So you keep going into the process, you keep lying to yourself until you believe the idea and put it into your brain.”
The Egyptian King also shared his secret to visualising success: “Ninety per cent of my goals, I visualise in my head, or even more. You just visualise what you want to happen and you keep repeating it and repeating it.”
