It’s high time we appreciated Sadio Mane

Liverpool face PSG on Tuesday night in their biggest test of the season so far. He may not get all the plaudits, but Sadio Mane will have a big role to play. 

It’s Senegal, perhaps 15 years ago. Sadio Mane, although just a boy, was under no illusions as to what path his life was to take. “I think I have a chance to become a footballer,” he told his parents.

They had other ideas. “My parents felt that I should study to become a teacher, they thought football was a waste of time and I’d never succeed at it.” In all fairness to them, as Mane reasons, “I was born in a village where there had never been a footballer who’d made it to the major championships.”

But for the man himself, any current under-appreciation of his talents won’t come as a novelty. It exists today just as it did in his formative years. Only now the implications are far more important. Mane is no longer a schoolboy with lofty ambitions — he’s the man whose realized them. Yet perhaps not everyone appreciates the extent to which he has.

Picture the scene — you’re in the pub, your office, your living room or indeed any space that might facilitate a soccer-related discussion. That old chestnut resurfaces for umpteenth time: “name your top 20 players in the league.”

The usual’s are fired off in quick succession — De Bruyne, Hazard, Salah, Kante, De Gea, Kane, Silva, Pogba, Alli, Eriksen, Sanchez — you get the idea. But as the list enters its latter stages, it’s not unusual for Mane’s name to escape attention.

Popular opinion is, of course, neither the proper nor accurate way to gauge pedigree. But in professional circles, too, there’s reason to believe his recognition is disproportionate to his impact.

That’s not to say Mane is an inconspicuous, anonymous force — a place in the 2016-17 Premier League Team of the Year proves as much. But in an age where statistics define perceptions, one can’t help but wonder what prevents Mane from standing alongside, rather than beneath, his so-called superiors.

Certainly when it comes to goals, anyway. Over the past three seasons, in all competitions, Mane has found the net 48 times at an average of 16 goals per season. That one of these campaigns was spent at Southampton only makes the number more impressive.

In the same time frame, Eden Hazard has bulged the net 40 times, Dele Alli 46, Christian Eriksen 34 and Alexis Sanchez 55. If you weren’t scratching your head before, perhaps you are now.

And nor can the “flat-track bully” stigma, a textbook retort to any scrutinized forward, be leveled at the Senegalese international. In fact, the immediate threat for PSG is that the bigger the occasion, the better the Mane.

Ten goals in last season’s Champions League campaign was no mean feat. Such numbers are rarely mentioned outside the superhuman realm inhabited exclusively by Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. And if broken down, they’re even more revealing. For not only did Mane cash in at the group stage, but in every single knock out round as well — once against Porto, once against City, twice against Roma and once against Real Madrid.

And if that wasn’t enough, his total surpassed the entirety of Hazard’s, Alli’s and Sanchez’s European careers. Yet when it came to deciding the Champions League Squad of the Season, Mane can only have been forgotten; on merit, no one could have denied him inclusion.

The suggestion here is not that there is some form of conspiracy against Mane. But a strange reality remains. A lack of trophies is certainly a sticking point, but to deploy that weapon would be to impose gross double standards. After all, Alli and Kane are hardly decorated players.

Although ridiculed as inflated at the time, Mane’s price tag has undoubtedly contributed. £34 million nowadays doesn’t just get you a Danny Drinkwater, but also exempts you from the sort of attention, pressure or scrutiny enjoyed (endured?) by your more expensive peers.

Sadly, a conservative social media presence almost certainly plays into it as well. There are times when Paul Pogba’s haircuts seem more important than his performances. Mane seems almost completely disinterested in that side of the game.

Yet amid all the mooting, one truth remains. Regardless of whether or not Mane’s breaks into the upper echelons of popular, and indeed professional, conscience, back in Senegal any illusions in the Mane household have surely been extinguished.

And for now, come Tuesday, PSG would do well to take note.