It really was a sorry trudge. Head down, a handshake for the touchline elders and a quick retreat into his tracksuit and thoughts.
The first of which may have been how the third best player in the world was hooked with 25 minutes still to play at 1-0 down.
And yet that is the way it seems to be going right now for Mo Salah. It all looked so easy last season and this one is all just that bit more laborious, a touch more like hard work, even if his hours seem to be getting cut.
Almost certainly that is all just the price of genius - people come to expect and there is nothing quite like a 44-goal season for raising bars.
By those standards, three goals and one assist in seven would, according to the thumbs of twitter, pin this little Egyptian as anything from 'bang average' to 'p*** poor' to a 'one-season wonder'.
It is woefully harsh, of course. Forgetting for a moment that Salah had a comparable four goals and one assist by this stage in 2017-18, this is hardly the greatest collapse since Jim Furyk sent out his boys for the Friday fourballs.
It is more an exercise in fine margins, those slithers of space that enable distinctions between a podium place at that FIFA junket, and a player being a disgrace to his family, school, neighbours and local pet shop.
The fact is he is not far off. He is still the fulcrum of attacks, still the Liverpool player with the sharpest movement, touches and vision. The kicker is that each facet is just a little down on what it was.
Indeed, it is hard to make an argument for any game in this campaign when he has fully resembled that magnificent and revelatory force of nature from last season. West Ham at home? That was probably the best of his bunch. And he got the winner against Brighton.
But what were predominantly 8/10 performances in 2017-18 has drifted out to sevens in this one. The prime difference would seem to be that he isn't finishing every chance - that much was again apparent here.
Consider the opening 10 minutes. In the fifth, he took a touch on the edge of the area and a fraction right of centre and scuffed the shot directly to Kepa. The plan was to set a course outside the far post and let the bend bring it in; in the cold light of day, it started just off centre and bounced slowly to the keeper.
A moment later, he took aim from precisely the same spot. Less heel and more toe this time - off it went, a long way high and a long way wide. Chelsea fans enjoyed that one.
Again, small errors. That was the tale of his evening when it all might have so different. What would the reaction have been, for example, if his shot around the half-hour mark had not been clipped off the line by Antonio Rudiger? The touch around Kepa immediately beforehand was perfect, the shot from a wide angle so almost made it in.
It was a similar picture a short time earlier, when he took possession on the edge of the area and in the bustle spotted Roberto Firmino coming in from the other side, crossing the six-yard box. The reverse pass behind David Luiz was just the tiniest of fractions from a superb assist. Few players possess the imagination to make that pass.
Still, his night ended on 66 minutes and with it the social media chatter continues, for whatever that is worth.
It doesn't help, of course, that major fixtures such as this one are so often characterised by the clashes of titans that they throw up. In this instance, that meant comparisons with Eden Hazard, a player who at his brilliant best hasn't quite touched the levels Salah reached last season.
This time round he might. He is that good and with a greater weight of numbers on his side, he will make the argument easier. Maurizio Sarri is already shouting it from the hilltops - in a matter of weeks he has elevated Hazard to the best in Europe and then on to one of the best in the world at only '75 to 80 per cent of his potential'.
It is not an unreasonable claim. His goal here made it six in the league this season, to go with two assists. Rather impressive in that is those six goals coming from nine shots. It is the kind of efficiency that Salah has found strangely hard to come by this season, and that might well have formed part of the Egyptian's thinking on Liverpool's bench on Saturday night.