Curtis Jones has said that Mohamed Salah apologised to the Liverpool team after his incendiary comments earlier this month and they have “moved past it”.
Salah said, after the Leeds United match, he felt “thrown under the bus” by the Merseyside club, and called his future into question after revealing his relationship with head coach Arne Slot had broken down.
After being left out of the Champions League squad against Inter Milan, he was recalled for the Brighton & Hove Albion league game on December 12, following positive talks with Slot.
“Mo is his own man. He can say his own stuff,” midfielder Jones said on Friday, per Sky Sports. “He apologised to us and said ‘look if I’ve affected anybody or may you feel any sort of way I apologise’. That’s the man that he is.
“I guess it’s just part of wanting to be a winner and I don’t think he will be the last. I get there are certain ways you can go about things but if a lad is fine just to be on the bench and he doesn’t want to play because he wants to help the team then I think that’s more of an issue.”
Jones said that the team has moved on and is starting to gel well (Carl Recine/Getty Images)
The comments from the Egypt international came after he was left out of the team for three games in a row and Liverpool had won only three of their last ten games. Since then, however, they have kept clean sheets in the wins against Inter and Brighton.
“When there has been any sort of anger from us including myself, it has always been from a good place,” Jones continued. “In the moment it might not have come out in the right way but its never been to ever affect the team, the staff, the manager or anybody like that.
“We’re past that now anyway so now we’re on the point of where we are gelling well as a team, playing well and starting to win games.”
Slot said in his news conference on Friday, before Saturday’s game against Tottenham Hotspur that “actions speak louder than words and we moved on”. “He was in the squad and he was the first substitution I made,” he said, referencing the forward’s cameo against Brighton.
Salah has been called up to the Africa Cup of Nations with Egypt and will be unavailable for the weekend Premier League game. AFCON, hosted in Morocco, is due to run between December 21 and January 18.