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Can Salah and Aubameyang close the Golden Boot race gap when Liverpool go to Arsenal?

  /  autty

Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Mohamed Salah have been here before. Two of the Premier League's sharpest shooters going head-to-head to win the coveted Premier League Golden Boot.

There is not much on the line when Liverpool travel to Arsenal on Wednesday. The Reds have already won the Premier League and the European hopes of Mikel Arteta's side are slim at best.

But two of the best attackers in the league will square off as they look to close the gap to Golden Boot leader Jamie Vardy with just three matches of the season left to play.

As it stands, Vardy is top of the pile with 23 league goals this season. Aubameyang is second with 20 and Salah is level with Southampton's Danny Ings on 19.

With three matches to go it will need something special from either the Arsenal striker or Liverpool forward to catch Vardy but, as Aubameyang or Salah have shown in the past, that is never out of the question.

It was only 12 months ago that the pair shared the award with Salah's Liverpool colleague Sadio Mane. They all finished on 22 goals for the season but Salah did have the worst goal-scoring ratio of the trio.

The Egyptian looks dead set on having the prize to himself this time around. Against Burnley he struggled to find a way past the impressive Nick Pope but there were a few chances at Brighton where he could have passed but went for goal instead as he searched for a hat-trick.

It sparked debate post-match over whether Salah is too focused on his own goal-scoring numbers and refuses to pass to team-mates as a result of his desire to find the back of the net.

But there is no doubting Salah's threat. At Brighton he chalked up an astonishing 100 goal involvements in 104 Premier League appearances.

He now sits on 73 goals and 27 assists, becoming just the fourth player to do so for the Reds after Steven Gerrard (212), Robbie Fowler (158) and Michael Owen (148).

And with 94 goals in 149 appearances for the Reds since joining in the summer of 2017, you cannot argue that he has every right to go for goal as often as possible.

If it were not for Salah's relentless performances over the past three years, it is doubtful the Reds would have reached the summit of domestic and European football.

Salah showed exactly what he is capable of against Arsenal when the sides met back in August. He scored twice that day, including a sensational goal where he left David Luiz for dead on the half-way line and hit an unerring finish.

Aubameyang, meanwhile, is one of the very few players in Mikel Arteta's squad to have world class ability.

While most of the Arsenal squad have struggled to maintain consistent form under Unai Emery and then Arteta, Aubameyang has upheld his lofty standards for the majority of the campaign.

He has scored 20 goals or more in both of his two full seasons at the Emirates and who knows where they would be in the Premier League table without their talisman.

But doubts over Aubameyang's future are hanging over the club. Their captain and star striker is reportedly demanding wages of £250,000-a-week before even considering whether to sign a new deal.

With the likes of Barcelona, Real Madrid, Juventus and Inter Milan all eyeing a bargain free transfer next summer, Arsenal must tie down their prized asset now to have any chance of reaching the Champions League again soon.

With very little to separate Aubameyang and Salah in goal-scoring terms, how do they compare in other attacking areas this season?

As already mentioned Aubameyang leads the way in goals with 20 to Salah's 19 but the Arsenal ace has played just under 300 more minutes. That gives Salah (142) a better minutes-per-goal ratio than his opposite number (146).

The Liverpool star is also comfortably ahead in the assists column with nine to Aubameyang's two and has created more chances, chalking up 59 to Aubameyang's 24.

Salah, as previously mentioned by his desire to score as many goals as possible, is way ahead in the shots column (122 to 87) and, as a result, has had more on target (56 to 39).

Aubameyang does have the better shot conversion rate (23 per cent to 15.6 per cent), showing he is the more accurate finisher.

In the last six meetings between Arsenal and Liverpool across all competitions there have been a whopping 32 goals, an average of 5.3 goals per game.

If Aubameyang or Salah can help themselves to just a few of those, it would go a long way to them closing in on Vardy and that Golden Boot.