Quiet, smiling assassin Sadio Mane has emerged matchwinner-in-chief

Sadio Mane is so softly spoken it can be difficult to hear him. In its own way, that feels fitting. Jurgen Klopp has brought the noise to Anfield, but Mane feels the quiet, smiling assassin, the man whose words could be drowned out by his manager’s laugh and whose profile is smaller than Mohamed Salah’s.

And yet, as a scrum of reporters strained to hear his words in the Melwood sun on Tuesday, there came recognition of sorts for Mane’s dynamic brand of brilliance. What, he was asked, did he think of links with Real Madrid? “This is part of football,” came the matter-of-fact reply.

And perhaps it is if you are Sadio Mane. For the record, the Senegalese stated how happy he is at Liverpool. For the factually inclined, he could join Phil Neal as the only Liverpool player to score in two European Cup finals; he could become the only man to find the net in successive European Cup showpieces for an English club. Mane may be the history maker who nevertheless seems part of the supporting cast.

Salah is the man spared some defensive duties and the player who has pipped Mane to the African Footballer of the Year award in both 2017 and 2018 but perhaps 2019 should bring a rethink. Salah and Mane may have shared the Golden Boot with a third Klopp signing, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, but with a different distribution of goals. The Egyptian endured his longest Liverpool drought in the calendar year. The Senegalese has struck 17 times, 14 of them in the Premier League.

Yet if Salah displaced Mane from the right flank, the signing from Southampton may have dethroned Liverpool’s Egyptian King from the title of the matchwinner-in-chief. If part of the power of Liverpool’s front three is that each can assume such duties, in turning explaining why the era of the superstar may be giving way to a shared sense of responsibility, a greater emphasis on the team.

Mane, Salah and Roberto Firmino made history in 2017-18 when they became the first trio from one club to reach double figures in the same Champions League campaign. Liverpool can be an antidote to Messidependencia, the replacements to Cristiano Ronaldo as European Cup winners.

While Barcelona and first Real Madrid and then Juventus became more of star vehicles as the gulf between the best and the rest within their teams widened and as their ageing talismen covered less ground to preserve their energy for individualistic pursuits, Mane ran 125km in this season’s Champions League. He looks their hyperactive opposite while Klopp’s collectivism threatens to herald a new age. It is a form of chaos theory, with disorder created by running power, married with footballing socialism, an Anfield anarcho-syndicalism. Other clubs have pre-eminent players. Salah has felt first among equals on Merseyside, Mane billed at best second.

And yet he is sandwiched by the game’s resident icons. In the last 16 months, he has 10 goals in the Champions League’s knockout stages; one more than Lionel Messi, one behind Ronaldo. No one else comes close.

He has only failed to score in one of Liverpool’s seven ties in that time. Even then, he proved a point. Liverpool faced Barcelona at Anfield minus Salah and Firmino. Mane compensated by running the Spanish champions ragged. Others got the goals, but Mane tormented a second quintuple European Cup winner in the campaign.

His two-goal display against Bayern Munich was both an exceptional performance and an illustration he is much more than just a speed merchant. His exquisite opener, complete with the deft touch to control a long pass, the sharp turn, the assured dinked finish, was masterly. His second came from Salah’s outside-of-the-boot cross and yet last year’s 44-goal scorer’s major contribution to this Champions League campaign was the group-stage decider against Napoli. In the knockout stages, Mane has emerged as the key man.

That brace in Bavaria made Mane Liverpool’s record away goalscorer in the Champions League; that blistering pace can make him a particular threat on the counter-attack. It explains why he has other high-profile admirers among managers who show a commonality of thought. Mauricio Pochettino had hoped to sign Mane from Southampton in 2016. Liverpool’s capacity to pay bigger wages helped, but it is easy to imagine Mane’s directness making him ideal for a Pochettino team. The great curiosity, perhaps, is that Manchester United bid for him in 2015, when his acceleration seemed to render him the antithesis of Louis van Gaal’s ponderous, static side.

The sense is that Mane suits Klopp’s turbo-charged brand of football rather better. He feels an ultra-modern player, the hybrid winger-striker, whose goals and assists tally seem to invert the wide man’s traditional duties. Directly, Mane made a solitary Premier League goal this season, putting him level with the Cardiff defenders Sol Bamba, Joe Bennett and Bruno Ecuele Manga. Indirectly, he fashioned rather more, not least by freeing up space for Andy Robertson.

Perhaps, as Liverpool have got stronger, Mane has seemed less indispensable. Liverpool won 68 percent of the games he started and 42 percent of those he did not in his debut season, 2016-17. This year, the figures are 71 and 75 percent respectively. And yet the most seismic of those victories came in the absence of Salah and Firmino. Mane’s surname lends itself to suggestions he is the main man. More importantly, so do his performances and goal returns in 2019, but if Salah still has the profile, his excellence has come in a Kloppian format where perhaps the team is the real star. Which may be the way Mane prefers it.