The Briefing: Why we would all miss Mo Salah and do Arsenal need to be braver?

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 Manchester United discovered some gumption and came from behind to win, Southampton failed to locate their spirit and threw away a two-goal lead to Leicester, Manchester City beat Wolves at the last, and Newcastle’s poor form continued.

Here, we will ask how worried we should all be about the prospect of Mohamed Salah leaving the Premier League, whether Arsenal’s lack of creativity is a concern, and what to make of West Ham United.

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Should neutrals be worried that Salah could leave soon?

Watching Salah excel must elicit some confusing emotions for Liverpool fans at the moment.

On the one hand, being around to see one of the five best players in their history must be glorious. This is his eighth season at Anfield and his penalty against Chelsea yesterday means he now stands on 162 Premier League goals, one behind Robbie Fowler and joint ninth (with Jermain Defoe) on the all-time list. He’s currently the fifth-highest scorer in Liverpool’s history, with 218 goals in all competitions: he will almost certainly overtake Billy Liddell on 228 this season and maybe even surpass Gordon Hodgson’s 241.

He’s also maturing like the finest of wines, too. This season he has five assists from eight Premier League games, which is already as many as he got in the whole of the 2020-21 season. He also has five goals: according to Opta, it’s the first time a Liverpool player has got to five goals and five assists this early in the season. Also according to Opta, after converting a penalty and setting up Curtis Jones in Liverpool’s 2-1 win over Chelsea on Sunday, he has scored and assisted in 34 different Premier League matches: only Wayne Rooney, on 36, has more.

All of which is magnificent and it must be a joy to support a team with a player like that, but there also must be a prickly feeling at the back of their minds due to his contract running out, no obvious progress being made over a new one and the looming prospect of him leaving next summer.

What will they do without him? They will be losing their primary goalscorer and now their primary assist-maker. There’s a case to be made, given how difficult it is to find a top-class, left-footed/right-sided wide forward, that he will be more difficult to replace than Jurgen Klopp.

But this should be a worry for the rest of us, too.

When Salah arrived in the Premier League, he was one of those players who you admired rather than necessarily looked forward to watching. He was ruthless, energetic and a goal machine, but perhaps without the element of fantasy that made the impartial observer sit up.

Now, though, he’s gained a sort of elegance as he has aged. His passing is incredible: the ball to Jones was fantastic, but it was one of about half a dozen glorious passes he played in the game, each one a prompt to start purring at their quality.

He’s the sort of player that makes watching the Premier League, which is often exciting but not especially subtle, a pleasure. The division will be diminished without him.

When he goes, Liverpool fans will mourn. But the rest of us should mourn with them.

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Will Arsenal’s lack of creativity against Bournemouth cost them?

It was heartening, for those of us who find basically all complaints about referees punishingly boring, that Mikel Arteta chose not to blame Arsenal’s defeat to Bournemouth on the decision to send off William Saliba.

“Tonight we made two big errors that cost us the game, unfortunately,” Arteta told the media after the match. Saliba’s decision to haul down Evanilson when through on goal was one of the big errors that Arteta was talking about. The other was Gabriel Martinelli failing to capitalise on Kepa Arrizabalaga’s dreadful kick in the second half, making it far too easy for the Bournemouth goalkeeper to redeem himself and make the save.

Arteta is right, of course. Had Saliba not hauled down Evanilson (whose only goal so far for Bournemouth has been against Southampton, so we’re not talking prime Ronaldo here: maybe just trust your goalkeeper next time?) and had Martinelli been more ruthless, then clearly the result would have been different.

But arguably more concerning for Arsenal was that the Martinelli shot was their only effort on target in the whole game. They only actually created another two shots from open play: one by Mikel Merino before the red card and one from Thomas Partey just before half-time. There were a couple of other attempts from set pieces, but even with the mitigation of them being down to 10 men, there was a worrying lack of creativity from Arsenal.

The most obvious explanation is that any team would struggle to make chances without their two most creative players. They will be desperately hoping that Bukayo Saka and Martin Odegaard will return very soon — Saka in particular. The England international is by no means underrated, but it has gone slightly under the radar that he has, by quite a distance, created the most chances of any player in the Premier League this season.

Arteta isn’t blameless, though. With those two out, did they really need to start with a midfield of Declan Rice, Merino and Partey? Might it not have been more adventurous to go with, say, Leandro Trossard in the middle? Or drop Kai Havertz back and start someone else up front? Or give the young but exciting Ethan Nwaneri a start? Or even put Jorginho in midfield?

If Arsenal don’t win the league this year because Manchester City do their usual thing and become a relentless juggernaut at some stage, then they can at least console themselves with the fact there wasn’t much else they can do. But if they don’t win it because they drop points by being creatively stagnant against teams they should really beat, even without two of their most important players, then they will have only themselves to blame.

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How long will Lopetegui have to turn West Ham around?

There is a temptation to think that West Ham are a lost cause, an irredeemable clown show who somehow manage to make the wrong decision at every turn, wasting money on a succession of ill-advised signings, a twitchy finger constantly hovering over the self-destruct button. They sometimes feel like the football equivalent of a man in a slapstick film, getting their collective foot stuck in a bucket and smacking someone in the face with a large plank of wood.

But then you remember that they won a European trophy 16 months ago and you conclude that they can’t be a completely cursed institution.

That day felt like a long time ago on Saturday, as they imploded with such gusto against Tottenham, losing their first-half lead in relatively quick time, letting in three more goals and then there was the incredibly unnecessary ruckus that resulted in Mohammed Kudus getting sent off for pushing a succession of opponents in the face.

If he’s a man who holds a grudge, then David Moyes will be cackling to himself. Twice West Ham have moved on from him in the search for something/someone a bit sexier. They came crawling back the first time and the second time isn’t going much better — so far, at least.

This isn’t to say that replacing Moyes was necessarily the wrong call. Things had grown stagnant, the relationship between him and the fans was virtually non-existent, and it felt like the natural end to an era.

It’s also too early to write Julen Lopetegui off. He clearly can be a good manager and the season is still young, but there are plenty of warning signs there: that Lopetegui has tried a jumble of formations and team selections as he searches for something that works, for the most part unsuccessfully so far; the capitulation, conceding three times in eight minutes; the fact they only created three chances after that calamitous spell; the collapse of discipline that resulted in Kudus’ dismissal; the sight of fans leaving the away end with half an hour left.

They still have a bit of a gap to the relegation zone, but their only wins have come against Ipswich and Crystal Palace, teams who haven’t won a game themselves. Frankly, they are a mess and Lopetegui will have to figure out how to fix them in pretty short order, otherwise, their season could go south very rapidly and his future will be in doubt.

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Coming up

• This round of Premier League games is brought to a close on Monday evening, as the only Premier League club within walking distance of a branch of Hooters faces the only one with a supermarket in their ground. Or, as it says on the fixture list: Nottingham Forest vs Crystal Palace.
• Then it’s big boy time: the Champions League. The choice game on Tuesday night is a repeat of last year’s final, as Real Madrid host Borussia Dortmund, while elsewhere Arsenal face Shakhtar Donetsk and it’s Aston Villa vs Bologna.
• Wednesday is even spicier, with what can only be described as a big daddy clash as Barcelona face Bayern Munich, while RB Leipzig vs Liverpool is slightly lower profile but no less interesting. Elsewhere, Manchester City play Sparta Prague and Atalanta host Celtic.
• There’s some Europa League fun to keep everyone entertained across Wednesday and Thursday and the big narrative clash sees Jose Mourinho show Manchester United what they’re missing, facing them with his new(ish) team Fenerbahce. Another club from Jose’s past, Tottenham, are up against AZ Alkmaar.
• And the Europa Conference League, of course. Chelsea are off to Athens to play Panathinaikos, while last year’s finalists and Serie A trailblazers Fiorentina play St Gallen of Switzerland.
• If Europe isn’t your thing, then there’s a big old chunky set of EFL fixtures — in fact, more or less a full set, and the standout in the Championship game is probably Leeds vs Watford on Tuesday evening.
• And finally, the week is topped and tailed with Forest: this time they face their East Midlands (sort of) rivals Leicester City on Friday, where there will be an awful lot of confusing emotions relating to Steve Cooper.

(Top photos: Mohamed Salah, Mikel Arteta; by Getty Images)