Mohamed Salah scored on his return from injury as Liverpool maintained their lead in the Premier League championship race with a 4-1 victory against Brentford on Saturday, putting them five points ahead at the top.
Darwin Nunez started the scoring with a brilliant first-half chip, and goals after the interval from Alexis MacAllister and Salah, who was playing his first game for Liverpool in over six weeks following a hamstring injury suffered at the Africa Cup of Nations, virtually finished the game.
Brentford’s Ivan Toney pulled one back, but Cody Gakpo scored Liverpool’s fourth to seal a comfortable victory for the visitors.
The result elevated Liverpool to 57 points and returned the ball to the court of
In what is shaping up to be one of the tightest title races in years, Pep Guardiola’s City side, arguably still in the box seat with two games in hand, host Chelsea in Saturday’s late game after Arsenal visit Burnley.
While his side cruised to a sixth win in their last seven league games, there was a sour note for Liverpool manager Juergen Klopp, who was already dealing with a lengthy injury list before Curtis Jones and Diogo Jota were taken off in the first half and Nunez failed to emerge after halftime.
The Liverpool manager was already without a number of key players through injury including goalkeeper Alisson Becker, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Dominik Szoboszlai.
“That’s really not good. But we can’t change that anymore,” Klopp told reporters when asked about the latest injuries.
“In these situations the performance level could have dropped, but it was the other way around. We played an exceptional game. By far the best game since I’ve been at Liverpool here at Brentford.”
