Jurgen Klopp has dismissed theories Mohamed Salah’s downturn in form may be aligned to his Liverpool contract.
Salah is set to make his 200th league appearance in Saturday’s trip to Wolves and sits a goal behind Gordon Hodgson’s haul of 126 after the same number of games.
But the Egypt international is on a surprising barren streak, having found the target just once in his past seven outings for the Reds in all competitions.
Last summer, following a prolonged impasse, Anfield chiefs handed Salah a new three-year contract to tie his future to the club until summer 2025.
Klopp, however, insists the 30-year-old has not become complacent since penning that fresh extension and hailed the forward’s continued drive.
He said: “Attitude and these kind of things is really not Mo’s problem. It will never be.
“Mo is a world-class athlete so he’s the first first in, the last out, trains hard, all these kind of things.
“Now he’s not scoring but I think there are people out that think ‘why did they give Klopp a new contract?’ so that’s how it is in our world.
“It’s completely fine. We don’t deliver in the moment so there’s criticism. It’s no problem. You can question character, knowledge, ability – everything.
“You have the right o do everything but you cannot score the amount of goals Mo scored if you are not an outstanding world-class football player.
“But even they don’t do that constantly. I can explain it now, I don’t want to talk about it, but we had to change too much to just let it flow.
“There were moments when Mo of course would have scored last year, there was a Brighton game as well, a 100% goal usually and now not. You think that has something to do with a new contract or whatever, it’s just not right.
“The things are like they are and the only chance we have really to stop these questions and discussions is by performing to our top top level.
“That’s what we have to do and that’s what we will work on.
“It never happened overnight but we made steps. It’s not that everything what we said four weeks ago was completley useless because nobody can see that we learned anything from it.
“We are really on it and still [up] straight, positive, we want to play the games and all these kind of things and we believe in our chance as well for reaching something special even this year.
“Of course it’s not great to not be the leader of the pack in the moment but we are in a position where we can improve a lot the situation in the table and that’s what we want to do and we have to start tomorrow and keep going from there.
“Who cares who we play, we play all of them [again] probably, so we get a new chance against pretty much everybody and that’s what I’m really looking forward to.”