The Briefing: Salah’s future, Casemiro’s ‘Neville moment’ – and when will Southampton learn?

Welcome to The Briefing, where every Monday during this season, The Athletic will discuss three of the biggest questions to arise from the weekend’s Premier League football.

This was the weekend when Erling Haaland rendered all superlatives redundant again with his merciless goalscoring, Everton reached new depths of despair by going into the 87th minute against Bournemouth 2-0 in the lead and still managing to lose, while Tottenham once again dominated but couldn’t win.

Here, we will ask if Liverpool should tie Mohamed Salah to a new contract whatever the cost, whether this is the end for Casemiro as a starter for Manchester United, and if Southampton need to change to avoid a humiliating season.

Should Liverpool do everything they can to keep Salah?

If you asked someone unfamiliar with the Premier League narrative to watch Liverpool’s 3-0 win over Manchester United on Sunday and identify which team’s manager was in their third season and which team’s manager was in their third game… well, you’d forgive them for being fooled.

Arne Slot’s first few weeks as Jurgen Klopp’s successor could not really have been better: three games, three wins, seven goals scored, no goals conceded. You could quibble and say the opposition hasn’t been up to much, but it feels like nit-picking. As Opta pointed out, Slot is the first manager to win his first three games in the Premier League without conceding a goal since Sven-Goran Eriksson, with Manchester City in 2007.

And yet, while the key man off the pitch is new, the key man on the pitch is still the same. For all Slot’s Liverpool look coherent, controlled and ruthless, things would probably look pretty different if someone else was playing on the right side of their attack.

Mohamed Salah has scored three of those seven goals. He has set up another three and for the other, he started the lightning counter-attack that Luis Diaz finished against Brentford.

Watch Salah’s pass for Diaz’s second goal at Old Trafford: there was a narrow channel about two yards wide through which he could reach the Colombian and it needed enough pace to make it past the United defenders but not so much pace that Diaz couldn’t take a first-time shot. You associate Salah with quick feet and deadly finishing, but passes like that remind you what a brilliant all-round footballer he is.

It felt like a time to celebrate his enduring excellence, but his post-match comments put a bit of a dampener on that.

“As you know, it’s my last year at the club,” he told Sky Sports. He then sort of clarified/added a caveat by saying: “I was coming to the game thinking this could be the last time (playing at Old Trafford).

“Nobody at the club has spoken to me yet about contracts, so I will play my last season and see at the end of the season.”

He would have known that comments like that would create a commotion, but was this an attempt to get a fresh deal from Liverpool given this one expires at the end of the season? Or just a bit of agenda-free honesty, bluntly stating the facts without necessarily having an ulterior motive?

Either way, it’s a problem for Liverpool, one that the new regime of Michael Edwards and Richard Hughes have inherited. Perhaps they just wanted to get the transfer window out of the way before discussing terms with their existing players: Trent Alexander-Arnold and Virgil van Dijk are in a similar situation.

But performances like that will only strengthen Salah’s position and while there is plenty of nuance to consider, it makes the answer to the question ‘should Liverpool tie him down, whatever the cost?’ seem quite straightforward.

Was that Casemiro’s ‘Gary Neville against West Brom’ moment?

It probably wasn’t even the mistakes that led to Liverpool’s first two goals that were the most concerning thing. They were bad, but it took two pieces of brilliance by Salah and a couple of outstanding finishes by Diaz to punish them.

It was arguably something rather more low-key that summed up the day for Casemiro.

Just before half-time, he received a short throw on United’s right flank. All he needed to do was dab the ball back five yards to the taker. It’s something he has probably done thousands of times in his career. It’s something you or I could do easily. It’s a basic training exercise.

He stabbed it three yards to the right, straight out of play.

His substitution at half-time felt like a mercy move by Erik ten Hag, as much to protect him from further humiliation as a way of improving how United were playing. It was reminiscent of Gary Neville’s last game of professional football, against West Brom in 2011, when he admitted that he knew his career was over while he was still on the pitch.

Maybe this wasn’t quite that bad: Casemiro actually looked OK in the first couple of games of the season and it would be quite a surprise if he announced his retirement tomorrow, but it wouldn’t be a shock if that’s the last time he starts a big game for United.

When Ten Hag was asked about Casemiro after the game, he tried to be as positive as possible but offered the quietly brutal: “I’m sure he can keep contributing to our team.”

Maybe it’s harsh to single out any United player after a performance like that. Maybe it’s harsh to single out any United player given the system Ten Hag plays naturally exposes the holding midfielder, thus giving them a thankless task: it’s a bit like asking a cellist to play a symphony but you keep putting your hands over their eyes so they can’t see the sheet music. Maybe, despite his performance, Casemiro isn’t actually the problem.

Manuel Ugarte is the latest player United hope will fix things, an unhealthy state of affairs that has repeated itself many times over the past decade: just one more signing, then they’ll be OK.

Casemiro’s performance was bad. He probably shouldn’t be allowed near a game like that again. But if United think replacing him will fix everything, they’re in for another disappointing season.

Should Southampton change before it’s too late?

Southampton manager Russell Martin has long had a reputation for his dedication to passing football. His teams — going back to his time with MK Dons and Swansea, before he moved to Southampton in 2023 — try to control games by keeping the ball and always start attacks by playing out from the back, with short, theoretically quick passes, beating the press.

Last season in the Championship, they attempted 32,772 passes, over 2,000 more than the next on the list, Enzo Maresca’s Leicester, who also had a reputation for being obsessed with possession. Only 2,855 of those were ‘long’ (longer than 30 yards), with nearly half of their passes being under 15 yards.

Before the start of this season, Martin told the Daily Telegraph: “There is a massive pressure from media and supporters to change and adapt and I have had that all summer – ‘Oh, you are going to have to change the way you play in the Premier League’.

“Of course we are going to have to adapt in some games, but it’s illogical to get to the Premier League doing one thing and then say, ‘Oh, we aren’t going to do it now’. What is the point in the last five years, then? My feeling is we are going to have to be more us than ever, braver than ever.”

Idealism is good. People shouldn’t simply think about football as winning and losing: if you do, then much of its joy disappears. If Martin wants to stick with this idea of how the game should be, then on some level it feels churlish to suggest he should change.

But Martin does have a fairly recent example of a team playing in a similar (although not identical) fashion in the Championship, only to discover it isn’t easy to replicate at a higher level. Under Vincent Kompany, Burnley tried to do what they had done in their promotion season, with slightly higher-standard players but against a much higher standard of opposition. It didn’t work.

Burnley eventually did change, but by that point, it was too late and they were relegated. It’s far too early to say Southampton are bound to suffer the same fate, but the initial signs aren’t great.

They could argue they were unlucky against Newcastle in the first game, but in their second against Nottingham Forest, they were fortunate to only lose by one goal. Forest are not a team that presses particularly aggressively and they still won the ball back in dangerous places three or four times: you feared for Southampton when they did face a side that pressed more.

Which brings us to their defeat at Brentford. The first two goals they conceded came from Thomas Frank’s side relentlessly harassing the Saints’ defenders as they tried to play out, forcing mistakes and capitalising. The first goal came in the 43rd minute and the only surprise was that it took that long.

It looks — and presumably feels — great when it comes off, but when it doesn’t it looks — and presumably feels— abysmal and the epitome of refusing to learn from mistakes. Perhaps these are just teething problems and Southampton will improve as the season goes on. Perhaps Martin will reason that Kompany got the Bayern job by (mostly) sticking to his principles, so it can’t be all bad. Perhaps it’s good that a manager stubbornly sticks to how he believes things should be done.

But on the early evidence, Southampton won’t stand a chance of staying up if they keep playing like this.

Coming up

• Thought the transfer window was over? Thought you could relax and concentrate on watching football? Think again! Some windows are still open, so there is still a chance for your club to shift that deadweight that is hanging around, stinking up the place.
• Some selected windows that are still open and the dates that they close: Saudi Arabia, Germany and the Netherlands (all September 2), Belgium (September 6), Qatar (September 9), Turkey (September 13) and Portugal (September 16).
• It’s international week! Great news. The Nations League, no less. The bigger games on Thursday aren’t massively interesting (although Spain are in action for the first time since they won Euro 2024, against Serbia), so may we direct you to San Marino vs Liechtenstein. San Marino have not won a game in 20 years and the last team they beat was… Liechtenstein. So this — sort of — represents their best hope of winning a game in a generation. Tune in.
• Friday is slightly more box office: it’s France vs Italy, which is always good fun, and while Wales vs Turkey is a little less sexy, it should still be pretty good.
• And then there’s next Saturday, which features Republic of Ireland vs England, Lee Carsley taking charge of his first game for the country he was born in against the one he played for 40 times.

(Top photos: Getty Images)