da marjack bet： As Liverpool and Tottenham fight over the scraps of a Europa League qualification spot this season, their star men will wonder what might have been

da blaze casino： Mohamed Salah has 27 goals this season and Harry Kane has 26, but it is fair to say that neither will look back on the campaign with any great fondness.

English football’s deadliest marksmen, in the pre-Erling Haaland era anyway, meet this weekend, but both will recognise that Sunday’s Anfield clash is far from the grand event it has been in recent years, when honours and status and Golden Boots have invariably been on the line. 

Instead, this is a collision of the Premier League underachievers, the seventh best team in the league against the fifth best, and two clubs who will, for different reasons, be desperate to see the back of the 2022-23 campaign.

For Salah and Kane, the disappointment of this season will be felt particularly keenly. These are not players who expect, or deserve, to be playing Europa League football, after all. As it stands, Salah’s Liverpol are not even on course for that consolation prize. 

Europa Conference League, anyone? You’d have gotten good odds on that being a possibility back in August…

Getty ImagesRelentless consistency

It goes without saying, really, but the consistency of these two great goalscorers really is remarkable.

Since Salah arrived at Liverpool in 2017, he and Kane have been, by some distance, the two most prolific marksmen in the country. Between them, they have scored 358 club goals in that time, each of them have won three Premier League Golden Boot awards, and neither player has managed fewer than 24 in a single campaign. Each of them continue to set record after record, and both appear to love doing so.

They are, of course, very different players, but are kindred spirits in terms of their relentlessness, single-mindedness and importance to their respective teams.

And if you doubt that last point, just imagine where Liverpool and Spurs would be without them this season…

AdvertisementGettyBig calls

Salah and Kane have something else in common, too. Both have reached star status at their club, both have inevitably attracted interest from elsewhere, and as a result both have had big decisions to make in terms of their future.

Salah’s came last summer, when he reached the last year of his Liverpool contract. Despite fierce speculation, and a fair bit of posturing from the Egyptian’s agent, Ramy Abbas Issa, he opted to sign a new three-year contract, one which made him the highest-paid player in Reds history and which committed him to the club until just before his 33rd birthday.

Kane finds himself in a similar position this summer. The England captain signed a six-year contract back in 2018 and will enter the final 12 months of it in June. Spurs, naturally, would love him to extend, but as yet there is little sign that he will.

He has tried to leave before, of course, flirting quite openly with Manchester City a couple of years back. He might have become Tottenham’s all-time leading goalscorer since, but surely he regrets his failure to secure that move to the Etihad in 2021, especially as he watches Haaland, the striker Pep Guardiola eventually secured, tear things up.

One wonders, too, whether Salah has any regrets over his commitment to Liverpool, given the Reds’ demise this season. He has maintained his own scoring form – although he too has had patchy spells in terms of performance – but does he wonder what might have been, had he taken the plunge and joined Real Madrid or Paris Saint-Germain?

Maybe not. Sadio Mane’s struggles at Bayern Munich show the grass is not always greener. Salah stayed, continues to enjoy the love and support of the Anfield crowd, and continues to climb the Liverpool goalscoring charts too – Steven Gerrard, in fifth, is his next target.

And, unlike with Kane and Tottenham, there is enough reason to suspect that this season is an aberration, and that better times will return under Jurgen Klopp.

If they do, Salah will continue to play a key role.

Getty ImagesKane's summer decision

Kane, on the other hand, has a huge call to make. He turns 30 in July and has, in terms of medals, nothing to show for a club career which has brought close to 300 goals.

Spurs, rudderless and managerless, don’t look like a club set up to fix that, and it would be no surprise if Kane attempted to leave again this summer. He knows, for example, that Bayern Munich are long-time admirers, while Manchester United's need for a striker is as clear as ever. PSG, too, would take him in a heartbeat. He has plenty of suitors.

Whether any of them could convince Daniel Levy, Spurs’ hard-nosed chairman, to sell is another matter. Levy still hopes to persuade his star man to sign a new deal, and would be loath to lose him on a free transfer next year.

But would Kane really make the same mistake again? He's given his career to Tottenham, but at what cost?

GettyA quiet rivalry

It would be a stretch to say that Salah and Kane, two quiet and generally reserved individuals, have any kind of enmity, but there is no doubt that a rivalry has developed between the two in recent years, as they have found themselves head to head at the top of the scoring charts.

Salah admitted recently that the reason he started taking penalties for Liverpool, in early 2018, was because Kane had moved ahead of him in the Golden Boot race, and you might remember a tweet from the Egyptian’s account when Kane, controversially, was awarded a goal by the Premier League having claimed a touch on Christian Eriksen’s free-kick against Stoke. “Wooooooow really?” wrote Salah, though he did eventually pip his rival to the Golden Boot.

Both have good records against each other’s team. Salah has scored eight times against Spurs, including in the 2019 Champions League final, and Kane has scored eight times against Liverpool, albeit only once in a victory.

Expect an embrace before kick-off on Sunday. But expect both to be determined to outshine the other when the whistle blows.