Klopp Defends Salah Over Diving Allegations Against West Ham

I’m not the only one that notices this coming up a lot with Mohamed Salah, right? It seems like twice a season, the footballing world decides that Salah is a diver. The most recent example was in the West Ham match on Saturday.

Arthur Masuaku fouled Salah. The ‘interesting’ twist in this iteration of the same old song is that no one is trying to deny that. Masuaku was careless and fouled Salah inside the box. A penalty was, in fact, correctly awarded.

And yet. The belief that Salah made too much of the contact has dominated the news, enough so that Klopp was forced to address this nonsense at the Atalanta pre-match press conference on Monday.

”No – I don’t know what people need. What can I say? It was a foul I think for pretty much everyone who saw the situation,” Klopp said.

“Believe it or not, yesterday morning I spoke to Mo about how he feels and he has exactly three proper knocks on the foot, and one is from the penalty situation.

“That’s how it is, there’s a knock, you go down or not, whatever, sometimes the ref whistles it. We don’t talk that long about penalties we don’t get, yet here we are two days after the game talking about it.

“There was clear contact, so no, I don’t understand the criticism.”

When it comes to Salah, every penalty is a dive, and every dive is a stain on the integrity of football or something. Even stone-cold penalties like the one that occurred over the weekend. I could talk about the double standards of the English media and what that implies, but I’m tired. So instead, I’ll just repeat what Klopp said above: “I don’t understand the criticism.”