Friday, March 5, 2021 at 4:25 PM• Mart Oude Nijeweeme • Last update: 16:44

Michael Owen makes a fairly bizarre claim the day after the Premier League match between Liverpool and Chelsea (0-1). The former striker of the Reds thinks Sadio Mané consciously stayed on his feet when Antonio Rüdiger floored him in the Londoners’ penalty area on Thursday evening. According to Owen, the Senegalese did not award the penalty to Mohamed Salah, which would bring him closer to the Golden Shoe. Liverpool would eventually lose the game and thus ran into their fifth consecutive defeat at home, a negative club record.

Jürgen Klopp’s team appeared staggeringly weak on Thursday-evening and had to swallow the only goal of the game immediately after half-time, when Mason finished off Mount beautifully from the edge of the penalty area. “There was a moment in the first half when every Liverpool fan in the world thought, Penalty!” Optus Sport at the moment when Rüdiger Mané floored from behind. “I couldn’t believe he wasn’t going to the ground. I am not advocating that he should do that, but normally you see attackers easily go to the ground. ”

Owen believes that Mane deliberately stayed on his feet to go for a goal attempt and thus not award a possible penalty kick to Salah. “I wonder if he thought: wait a minute, I’m going to score, because if I lie down, Salah gets a penalty. We all know how competitive attackers are. We all know how selfish attackers can be. These players have been competing together for the Golden Shoe in recent years. ” Mane has scored seven goals so far this season, while Salah leads the Premier League top scorers list with 17 goals, two more than pursuer Bruno Fernandes.

Salah won the Golden Boot in the 2017-18 season, before sharing the trophy with Mané and Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang a year later. According to Owen, who himself was in the hands of the Golden Boot as a Liverpool player in the 1997/98 and 1998/99 seasons, selfishness played a decisive role on Thursday. “The competitive nature between Mane and Salah may be a wild theory, but we’ve all seen that they don’t play when one is better off than the other. In addition, Salah shook his head. We all know how badly they want to win the Golden Boot. It got me thinking. ”