Arne Slot was asked whether he would ever drop or substitute Mo Salah after the great Egyptian played really poorly but then won the game with an injury time penalty at Burnley recently.
The Liverpool manager’s response was that he does occasionally consider giving Salah less game time but always comes round to the conclusion that he is just too valuable.
Nevertheless Salah’s form will undoubtedly be a cause for some concern ahead of a big month for the champions that starts with a game at Chelsea on Sunday and then resumes after the international break with a visit from Manchester United.
On Saturday against Crystal Palace, as Liverpool succumbed to a defeat everybody sensed was coming at some point, my colleague Dominic King wrote about a lack of service and the issues of trying to adapt to new team-mates. Reasonable points.
But Dominic also said that Salah is simply ‘out of sorts’ and the truth is that he has been from the final third of last season onwards. This is actually an issue that predates this campaign.
Remember Salah’s performance in the Carabao Cup final against Newcastle? Or against PSG over two legs in the Champions League?
No, me neither. Salah was anonymous in both. Those games took place in March and since that time he has scored a relatively modest five club goals, including that penalty at Turf Moor.
Salah will depart for the Africa Cup of Nations in December and Slot will need something from him by then.
AMORIM SUB-STANDARD
The thing that threatens Ruben Amorim the most right now is that he understands what his problems are but doesn’t seem able to fix them.
In each of his last three Premier League games, Amorim has substituted one of his central defenders midway through the second half.
Why? Substitutions tend to be made to try and change things to win a game or to find a goal or to minimise the impact of an injury.
Changing one centre half for another just indicates you have picked the wrong one in the first place or that some of your players aren’t fit enough to last 90 minutes.
It’s hard to know which is worse.
KEEGAN NOT FORGOTTEN
One of the best football quotes of the weekend came not from the fields of the Premier League but from the fairways of Bethpage Black in New York.
‘All I can hear is “Keegan, Keegan, Keegan” out here,’ said BBC 5 Live’s John Murray as the US Ryder Cup team briefly threatened to get the upper hand.
‘The last time I heard that was in the 1980s’.
Murray is an old hand at big golf tournaments but is more commonly recognised as his station’s lead football commentator. He was also born in Northumberland.
He will always be a bit more Kevin than Bradley.
HENDERSON BACK TO RELEVANCE
Another native of the North East to have a good weekend was Jordan Henderson, once of Sunderland but now making his presence felt at Brentford.
Henderson’s most recent career moves seemed set to lead him to oblivion. Liverpool to Saudi Arabia and then Saudi to Ajax. None of that worked out well at all.
But a revival led by Thomas Tuchel’s insistence on having Henderson in every England squad since he took over at the start of the year has now continued in west London.
Henderson is 35 now and since his new team’s opening defeat at Nottingham Forest, he has started every single Premier League game for the club.
On Saturday against Manchester United, Henderson sat in front of his back four and played brilliantly and with intelligence. His early pass from deep created Brentford’s first goal but it was the protection he offered his defence that made him stand out.
Will he able to do this for England in the heat and humidity of an American World Cup next summer? It still feels unlikely but he will be on the plane for sure.
CHANGE FOR THE BETTER AT SUNDERLAND
Sunderland’s win at Forest means they need only more point to equal bottom club Southampton’s tally of 12 from the whole of last season. They have already won more games, three to Southampton’s two.
The secret of their early success after promotion by the play-offs has been parsimony. They have scored only seven goals – the lowest tally in the top 10 – but only Arsenal and Crystal Palace have conceded fewer than their four. It’s almost as if defensive reliability and clean sheets can take you places. Who would have thought that?
Their winning goal this weekend, meanwhile, spoke of the change of transfer plan the club committed to in the summer.
Previously under owner Kyril Louis-Dreyfus, Sunderland had followed a policy of buying young players who could do a job and be sold at a profit. Indeed when French midfielder Enzo Le Fee’s loan became permanent at the end of last season, it was the first time Sunderland had spent money on a player over the age of 24 since Louis-Dreyfus assumed control in 2021.
Over the summer, though, Sunderland tweaked the model. They recognised the flaws in a squad lacking nous and experience. Hence a goal scored at the City Ground by Omar Alderete – 29 in December – and created by captain Granit Xhaka, who turned 33 on the day he played the decisive pass.
BLADES FIND AN EDGE BUT FOR HOW LONG?
Away from the top flight, last year’s play-off final losers Sheffield United finally have a win after Chris Wilder’s second return as manager yielded a 1-0 victory at Oxford. They still sit bottom of the Championship, two points adrift of neighbours and rivals Sheffield Wednesday.
Can Wilder’s return to Bramall Lane work in the long-term? Well the differences in opinion between Wilder and the club’s owners over recruitment and even issues such as team selection were so great last season that they may even have parted company had promotion been achieved that day at Wembley.
Now they are back together, another fascinating chapter will be written. But there will have to be significant give on each side of the table for it to have the desired ending.
WEST HAM STUCK IN REPEAT CYCLE
West Ham are at Everton tonight with the handbrake pulled on a revolution and a claret and blue car now heading in the opposite direction.
It’s only a month since Karren Brady – West Ham’s vice-chairman – spoke about manager Graham Potter on talkSPORT.
‘West Ham is not a club that panics about its managers,’ she said.
‘We tend to stick with them and see it through. Graham is a great man.’
Potter may be a great man but he’s now a great unemployed man after Saturday’s sacking and his replacement, Nuno Espirito Santo, could not be more different.
Potter and Nuno play different kinds of football. Potter likes his teams to have the ball, Nuno not quite so much.
So how does a squad built this summer to suit one kind of coach now transition to suit another? The chances are it won’t. And so it goes on in east London.
Just as there rarely seems any great strategy in terms of player recruitment, so West Ham’s attitude to hiring managers is peculiar. Indeed the last time the club appointed a manager who was not unemployed was in 2003, when they took Alan Pardew from Reading.
As a policy, it’s cheap but it’s hard to say what else it has going for it.
