The Athletic: Real Madrid is a long-awaited opportunity for Liverpool and Mohamed Salah for "cold revenge"
The British newspaper "The Athletic" described the Real Madrid match as an opportunity that Liverpool, especially the striker of the first football team, Mohamed Salah, had long waited for in order to take revenge.
Scenes of losing the 2017/2018 Champions League final are still in the minds of coach, Jurgen Klopp, and Liverpool players, especially after Mohamed Salah was injured in the shoulder after the first 25 minutes after a strong intervention by Real Madrid captain Sergio Ramos.
The newspaper reported that despite the glory experienced by Liverpool in recent years, memories of the Kyiv final still haunt Klopp and his squad of players, and said that "revenge is the best dish served cold."
Klopp had described Ramos as a "brutal wrestler" who played a role in the fall of his team in May 2018 and accused the Real captain of intentionally targeting an injury, Mohamed Salah, who had scored at that time 44 goals in his first season with Liverpool and left the stadium crying after falling on His shoulder.
Klopp was not satisfied with that accusation but continued to criticize Ramos and hold him responsible for injuring Liverpool goalkeeper Loris Karius in the second half and criticizing the Serbian referee, Milorad Mazic, for lacking the necessary courage to expel the Spanish defender.
The results of the medical examination that Karius underwent showed that he had completed the match between Liverpool and Real Madrid while he was suffering from a concussion as a result of a blow to the head from Ramos.
There is also anger on the part of Liverpool players, and the England striker, Roberto Firmino, described Ramos as an idiot after the Spanish left and commented on the media accusing him of harming Mohamed Salah, describing it as a play because the Egyptian player was the one who grabbed his arm first and fell on the other side and accused me of being Judo was used to injure him.
Former Liverpool defender Diane Lovren, a close friend of Mohamed Salah, also admitted that he sought revenge against Ramos in the 2018 World Cup in a match between Spain and Croatia, where he sees that Ramos does some behavior that he does not like and harms the players.
What Ramos did was the reason for the refusal of the young Liverpool striker, Harvey Elliott, when he was in Fulham, to move to Real Madrid because of Mohamed Salah and what he suffered in the Champions League final.
Mohamed Salah described this night in press statements as the worst night in his career because it was a mixture of anger and sadness, especially since the injury almost prevented him from participating with the Egyptian national team in the World Cup a month later.
The Liverpool striker participated with Egypt from the second match against Russia and the third against Saudi Arabia after missing the first round against Uruguay, but the Pharaohs lost all the matches and were out of the group stage.
Now, after nearly 3 years of what happened in Kyiv, Mohamed Salah Ramos will face again, but this time in the quarter-finals of the Champions League and millions will wait for the match to see what happens, and therefore, it will be controversial.
The two teams still have a lot of players who played in 2018 final, only Diane Lovren, Loris Karius, Liverpool, and there is an injury to the Reds defender, Virgil Van Dyck.
Meanwhile, Cristiano Ronaldo and goalkeeper Keylor Navas left Real Madrid, the only players from the starting squad to have moved from the "Santiago Bernabeu" castle.