Salah is a big baby, but which benched Premier League players might be entitled to a bit of rant?

Mo Salah’s self-pitying tour of the Elland Road mixed zone to lament the dreadful unfairness of the manager who hates him only picking him for every single one of the first 12 Premier League games of the season before dropping him about two months after everyone else on earth said he should maybe try dropping him, got us thinking.

Who are the Premier League players out there this season who actually might be able to complain about their lot without just sounding like a great big entitled baby ?

And then we decided it is exactly these 10 lads, no more and no less.

The versatile defender was a key player in Arsenal’s transformation from top-four scrappers into genuine title contenders, making 32 Premier League appearances in 21/22 before missing only one game – through injury – in the two second-place finishes behind Man City that followed.

But he has been overtaken by events, Arsenal’s elite recruitment drive reducing a player still only 28 to spare-part status. From 32, 38 and 37 Premier League appearances his numbers collapsed to 17 last season as a knee injury took him out of the side for three months. Although he did manage to force his way back in by the end of the season, further summer recruitment has left him fighting an even tougher battle for Premier League minutes in a squad so ludicrously deep that it can withstand any injury crisis apart from an Arsenal injury crisis. Arsenal injury crises, of course, being very much the M&S of injury crises.

After picking up a minor injury in the opening game of the season at Man United , White has had to wait until this month for another chance, spending 10 games in a row getting splinters in his arse as an unused bench-warmer.

When he did finally get another chance, against Brentford last week, he promptly turned in a man-of-the-match performance.

Looks set to leave his boyhood club in January – on loan if nothing else – as the exasperation over his lack of Premier League game time grows. We’re not sure who’s more annoyed; Mainoo at his lack of chances, or Ruben Amorim at being asked about it in every press conference and delivering increasingly salty responses .

In fairness, we’ve got kids and so we do understand how annoying it can be when you get asked the same question all the time over and over again no matter how often you give the same response.

No, you can’t have a Kobbie Mainoo . We’ve got Casemiro at home.

Mainoo, who burst onto the scene so spectacularly under Erik Ten Hag and was a key player for England at Euro 2024 has just 171 minutes of Premier League football under his belt this season.

And do you know what’s even worse than Amorim’s treatment of Mainoo? The fact it’s upset Keysey . Hope you’re happy now, Ruben.

Spurs’ flamboyant late capture of the seemingly Chelsea-bound Xavi might have been designed primarily to make people forget about the transfer-window embarrassments Spurs had suffered when trying to sign Morgan Gibbs-White and Eberechi Eze from Premier League rivals, but he was and remains an excellent player who provides a creative spark otherwise almost entirely lacking from the Spurs squad.

The Dutchman didn’t exactly hit the ground running, it would be fair to say, but it’s become increasingly obvious – if it wasn’t already – that he simply wasn’t the man Thomas Frank wanted. And there has appeared a certain stubbornness in how long Frank kept him out of the team during a month when Spurs’ football was often moribund beyond belief and they won not one single game.

It’s one thing to find yourself out of a team as a big-money signing because someone else is doing your job better than you’ve been doing it. It’s quite another to find yourself out of the Spurs team as a big-money signing because the manager has decided he’d rather have literally nobody doing your job than you.

Frank finally relented for the home game with Brentford and was rewarded with a man-of-the-match display featuring a goal and an assist as tangible contributions to a more general vibe of watching Spurs not making you want to claw your own eyeballs out with a rusty spoon just so you don’t have to watch any more of it.

Poor sod. Never had Elliott’s stock been higher than this summer after his swashbuckling starring role as England U21s defended their European title. Elliott scored four goals in the three knockout games against Spain, Netherlands and Germany and had never looked more ready to graduate from the bit-part Premier League player he had become at Liverpool to a proper show-runner .

That always felt like it would need a move, but he made entirely the wrong one. Not because he went to a bad club – quite the opposite – but because he went to one where he just clearly wasn’t wanted by the manager.

Easy to forget now they’re swanning around in a title race, but Aston Villa had a difficult summer on the back of failing to qualify for the Champions League. Bringing Elliott in on loan was one of the late moves designed more to appease restless fans than for any real football purpose.

It became very clear very quickly that this certainly wasn’t a transfer Unai Emery sanctioned. His one Premier League start came back in September; he didn’t reappear for the second half, spent the next two games on the bench and hasn’t been in a matchday squad since.

Given that when Elliott was last on the pitch for Villa it was their sixth game of the season, they were drawing 1-1 with Fulham and hadn’t won a game all season and in his absence they have gone on to win that game and eight of the subsequent nine, he can’t really complain that Emery has got this badly wrong.

But he can be forgiven for wondering quite how what should have been a breakthrough season now looks sure to be a complete waste at the worst possible time for his career. And the real salt in the wound is that having played one poxy Premier League minute for Liverpool before joining Villa there isn’t even the prospect of trying again somewhere else in January.

Perhaps the most justified fume of the lot, this one. Trafford left City in pursuit of first-team football, found it at Burnley and did brilliantly well in a team that cruised back into the Premier League on the back of a miserly defence.

He appeared set to join Newcastle in the summer, before Man City exercised a matching clause from the deal that took him to Turf Moor to bring him home. This appeared initially to be a right result for Trafford, turning his Burnley move into a de facto loan before heading back to his parent club to become first-choice.

And he was, for a couple of games. He wasn’t, in fairness, flawless in those games and played a memorable part in extending Man City’s bafflingly poor record against Tottenham. But to see City respond to that by signing possibly the best goalkeeper in the world is a bit of a kick in the teeth.

Trafford is now thought to be eyeing up a January departure, and his ultimate punishment for having a slightly bad game against Spurs could yet end up being having to go and play for Spurs . Just seems really harsh.

There is one ray of light for Trafford at City , though. One possible and unexpected route back into the starting XI for a game at least, with Gianluigi Donnarumma quite magnificently on course to become the first Premier League goalkeeper ever to get suspended for accumulated bookings after somehow managing to collect four of the buggers in his first 12 Premier League appearances.

If there is a Liverpool player to have played a vital role in so much of their recent success who has a legitimate reason to grumble at the manner in which he’s found himself sidelined, then it’s surely Robertson given the way Milos Kerkez has been stinking up the left-back spot for so much of the season.

Robertson has had only three starts for Liverpool this season and it’s fair to say they’re a mixed bag because in there we’ve got the desperate 3-0 surrender at Man City and the p*ss-poor 1-1 draw against Sunderland.

But the only Premier League game all season in which Robertson has played a full 90 minutes? Last month’s 2-0 win over Aston Villa , a result which can compellingly be described as Liverpool’s only actually impressive one against a proper side in the Premier League since September .

Just don’t look too closely at who scored Liverpool’s opening goal that day, because otherwise the whole premise of this feature might start to crumble, and that wouldn’t do at all.

Missed the opening game of the season against Newcastle while still a Villa player through suspension, and had to wait until November to make his first start in a Newcastle midfield that is tough to break into.

Pro tip: if you have to wait four months for your first Premier League start at a new club, we strongly advise not making that start a limp 3-1 defeat at Brentford. Especially when that costs you your place for the next couple of games where your team beat Man City and Everton .

Watching the chaos of the 2-2 draw against Spurs from the bench having failed to get a start even with Bruno Guimaraes rested from the starting XI probably worked out for the best, and he did at last complete a full 90 minutes for his new club in what became an unnecessarily fraught 2-1 win over 10-man Burnley, mainly because of his own late handball. A win’s a win, we suppose.

If we’re honest, we’d clean forgotten he was even still at Everton . But he was a regular starter last season before and after a knee injury that sidelined him for four months, and barely missed a Premier League game for the Toffees in the two seasons before that.

But the problem for McNeil is really that one of memorability. It took only a few months of being reduced to brief substitute cameos for us to forget about him almost entirely. Do you know who you don’t forget about quite so easily? Jack Grealish.

Merely the latest recipient of the West Ham big-money striker curse, and it would be entirely fair to say he has pulled up only the tiniest imaginable number of trees since arriving at the London Stadium last summer.

But given how sh*tbone awful West Ham have so often been this season, any established Germany international striker – even one as misfiring as Fullkrug – is entitled to feel a little bit aggrieved to find himself discarded to the bench.

Fullkrug is one of many on this list where, sure, a large slice of personal responsibility is necessary, but so is a lot of time spent on a lot of substitute benches wondering just how it’s come to this.