Salah is back and ready to remind everyone how influential he is for Roma

Quick: without dwelling on it too long, name the best attacker currently playing in Italy?

Gonzalo Higuain? Edin Dzeko? Dries Mertens? All worthy answers to the question, depending on the width and breadth of the definition of “currently,” and players that certainly have come to stamp their authority on Serie A.

The success of these traditional number nines - or at least those operating from a central role - is obscuring the potency of one of Roma’s men of the season so far: Mohamed Salah.

Getting Salah may have been a gamble for Roma. It was noted in April that the Egyptian winger was hardly consistent while at Fiorentina, with a near-immediate spell of six goals in seven games followed by one goal in the subsequent fourteen. Thus far in Salah’s Roma career, a draught of that nature hasn’t arisen.

Instead, Luciano Spalletti has seen a voracious, tireless winger with a veracity and power to his shot that delivers goals, goals, and goals.

Playing off of a reborn Edin Dzeko has allowed Salah to blossom as an assist-man as well, and allows him space to exploit, with opposing defences so focused on stopping the league’s current capocannoniere.

Salah doesn’t seem to mind - with four assists in 16 league appearances demonstrating how he’s unselfishly and ruthlessly exploiting space that’s left behind for himself as well.

Salah scored on the opening day of the league for Roma, and since then, he’s only once had a spell without a goal in at least every two matches. Spalletti’s men have never lost when he’s on the scoresheet, recording six wins from those six games.

Prior to his departure to the Africa Cup of Nations, he had played the joint second most minutes on the team, along with Dzeko and behind only Wojciech Szczesny, and started fifteen Serie A matches this season. In short, he’s shown an incredible amount of consistency.

With Dzeko earning (deserved) plaudits this season for his renaissance, it is difficult to overstate how important Salah is to this Roma team. It’s a testament to the depth of the side that they only occurred one loss in the league during his AFCON absence, though in the eight games he didn’t score for Roma in the fall, the side’s record read three wins, two draws, and three losses.

Salah hasn’t just been arguably Roma’s best – he’s been one of, if not the premier, forwards in the league. The stats are more difficult to compare directly with others now, with the Egyptian missing significant periods of the past two months due to injury and his national team, but let’s rewind to late November, when he was healthy and started every game for Roma.

At that point, no one had created more chances up front than the Egyptian’s 44 – and only Dimitri Payet had more across Europe’s top five leagues. And here’s a list of players that had scored more goals than Roma’s winger at the time: Edin Dzeko, Mauro Icardi, Andrea Belotti, Ciro Immobile. That’s it.

And that’s even more impressive when you consider that Immobile’s nine goals included two penalties; Salah actually had more goals from open play than the Lazio striker, and just two less than Torino’s Belotti.

Even today, his strike rate in the league stands at a percentage that most prima punte would be proud of; eight goals in 16 appearances. He’s got a better goals-per-game ratio at 0.5 than some of the best attackers in the league, including Paulo Dybala (0.31) and Carlos Bacca (0.4).

Following a hugely successful spell at AFCON, where he helped guide Egypt to the finals with crucial strikes against Ghana and Burkina Faso, his return to the side and to full fitness should only spark Roma’s attack into even better form and give Spalletti some fantastic decisions to make up front.

While the Italian press are delighted – rightfully so – that Italy now has two strikers in Belotti and Immobile that look to be replicating fantastic performances for their clubs with their country, and the entire peninsula seeing the fruits of Dzeko’s adaptation to the league pan out marvelously in his second season, the sterling performances of Roma’s Egyptian winger have been somewhat overlooked after his recent absence.

But now Salah is back, and at just the right time. If he can quickly rediscover the form and consistency he was showing in the first part of the season, he will quickly remind everyone of just what he adds to this Roma side.