Liverpool 2-1 Bournemouth: The conspiracy theorists are crawling out

Liverpool beat Bournemouth 2-1 after Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane scored, but that hasn’t stopped some conspiracy theorists from crawling out the woodwork.

It was so nearly even worse than that, however, as Callum Wilson gave the Cherries an unlikely lead and we all forgot that this side didn’t coin the term mentality monsters for no reason.

And that’s because we’d seen them wilt in the face of Atletico Madrid’s noise, shithousing and defensive resolution. We’d seen them spaff away three points at Watford and then fail to do anything of note against Chelsea.

But suddenly the old Liverpool were back and the dogs of war were snapping, feeding the forwards and watching as Sadio Mane and Mohamed Salah hit the back of the net.

However, so was the old wives’ tale that there is some sort of bad blood between these two African princes and it was all sparked by the fact that Mane played an awful ball to Salah for the first goal.

When you see it, you understand that it was truly dreadful. There’s no way a player as good as Sadio should be messing up a fairly simple square ball across the face of the box.

But Mane managed to hit it behind Salah, who needed to turn and that caused the attack to nearly break down. Only the individual skill of the Egyptian rescued the whole thing has be belted the ball into the back of the net regardless of how many Bournemouth defenders surrounded him.

These two players are elite forwards, and yes, there are moments when one of them gets annoyed at the other for their tunnel vision and desire to be the one who scores a goal. But all top players are like that – it’s what feeds their goal scoring machine.

So let’s just enjoy the win, block out the unnecessary noise and focus on the Champions League game on Wednesday.