Few people know the sea better than Guillaume Picard. He grew up on a boat moored in the port of Hyères in southern France after his parents left 1960s Paris. His first job was on a sailing boat. Then he spent 30 years in the merchant navy before becoming a commercial captain, ferrying tourists and containers across the Mediterranean for more than two decades.

Now aged 65, his grey hair in a ponytail, it is with no small note of sadness that he says, increasingly, it is the land that calls him. “To be completely honest, I want to go to sea less and less,” he says. “I go hiking a lot in the mountains with my wife, and we’ve found an environment that is much more preserved. The mountains are beautiful wherever you go.”

Picard’s beloved sea is being destroyed, he believes, by something uncomfortably close to home: cruise ships. Fifteen years ago they were a rare sight in Marseille. Now, France’s second city is one of Europe’s busiest cruise ports. Last year, 2.5 million passengers stopped off, according to the port authority, a million more than the year before.

Faced with this new reality, Picard has decided to become the sea’s protector, swapping his captain’s whites for the all-black of a non-violent protester. His new crew is a growing group of activists known as Stop Croisières, or Stop Cruises. “At some point we will have to make a choice for our children, for our grandchildren,” he says. “Do we continue to make bigger and more energy-consuming ships with more and more people on board? Are we really going to be able to continue to live on this Earth like this?”

The group is part of a growing protest movement against the cruise ship industry and overtourism across Europe’s cities more broadly. Throughout August, Extinction Rebellion stopped cruise ships entering ports in the Netherlands, and earlier in the year tourists were targeted with water pistols in Barcelona by campaigners demanding, among other things, the closure of cruise ship terminals.

Some cities are implementing measures to limit the cruise industry’s activity, such as banning the ships from city centres, reducing the number that can visit and introducing a tax on passengers. But in Marseille the situation seems harder to change.

Two years ago, the city’s mayor, socialist Benoît Payan, launched a petition calling for limits on the number of cruise ships allowed to arrive during times of peak pollution, declaring: “Marseille is suffocating.” It attracted more than 50,000 signatures, but little further action. Instead, plans are going ahead for a new cruise terminal to open in 2026 in the Port of Marseille, which is controlled by President Macron’s government in Paris.

“We are not at all decision makers in Marseille, unlike other ports where there are more restrictions for local communities,” says Sébastien Barles, deputy mayor for the environment. “I think no one in Marseille, except for some merchants, can say cruises bring them a lot of money.”

Stop Croisières first attracted attention in 2020 when its members – the core of whom now number between 50 and 100, says Picard, including paramedics, lawyers and ecologists – unfurled a banner over a bridge in the northern neighbourhood of L’Estaque, saying: “In Marseille, breathing kills.” The group made the news again in 2022 when it carried out its first kayak stunt, holding up the Wonder of the Seas, then the world’s largest cruise liner. Then last month the group kayaked out into the mouth of the port of Marseille and delayed three cruise liners for several hours before being arrested. After both the group’s kayak stunts, its activists were arrested and then released.

Picard, who has two daughters and grandchildren, has become a kind of father figure to the group. “I’m extremely touched by the commitment of all these young people I see at Stop Croisières,” he says. “They could all be my children, almost. And I find them extremely motivated, well organised, and aware of the world in which we live.”

For Picard, the switch from boat captain to protester has been a long journey of self-education. When he started working on ships he knew they were “machines that pollute a lot”, but little more than that, he says. He became increasingly aware of the impact of parking such “big monsters” in the middle of a city, and when his first grandchild was born he decided he needed to act. He says some former colleagues now resent him, while others sympathise without daring to speak out. The captain of one of the liners the activists stopped last month was an old colleague who left him a voice message during the protest. “I haven’t listened to it,” he says.

He has regrets about his former career as a commercial sailor, but is trying to share his knowledge of the maritime world with as many people as possible in the hope that it can be useful. “I certainly feel guilty,” he says. “It’s guilt for having participated in the destruction of life. But maybe that is the engine that makes me an activist now.” There is also something stronger than guilt driving his actions. “I also have a huge feeling of anger against the shipping companies.”

Despite his disillusionment with the current state of play, he has not lost hope of rediscovering his love of the sea. “For the moment it’s a bit like it’s on standby, the sea. With Stop Croisières I interact with it in a different way.”

The stink of excrement was the first thing the residents of Sitilpech noticed when the farm opened in 2017. It hung over the colourful one-storey homes and kitchen gardens in the Maya town in Yucatán, and has never left. Next, the trees stopped bearing fruit, their leaves instead covered with black spots. Then, the water from the vast, porous aquifer emerged from the well with a horrible, overwhelming stench.

“Before, we used that water for everything: for cooking, for drinking, for bathing. Now we can’t even give it to animals. Today, we have to give the chickens purified water because otherwise they get diarrhoea,” says one resident. “The radishes grow thin and the coriander often turns yellow. This has always been a quiet town, where life was very good until that farm started,” they say.

Sitilpech lies on the edge of the Ring of Cenotes, a vast network of sinkhole lakes and underground rivers formed by a meteorite impact 66m years ago. The pig mega-farm is just under a kilometre from the first home in the town. It is part of a network of between 500 and 800 facilities that have appeared across Yucatán peninsula in the past 20 years, often nestled in the middle of the internationally important Yucatán moist forest. A mega-farm can hold up to 50,000 pigs, packed tightly together in small pens. The urine and excrement, antibiotics and hormone treatments seep out beneath their corrals, and are then dried in open-air waste lakes in the tropical heat.

For those that live around them, the spread of the pig mega-farms is a human and ecological disaster. Some Maya villages in Yucatán are outnumbered by pigs 100 to one. In the rainy season, the farms pump out the pig waste through sprinkler systems; it oozes into the porous limestone watershed which connects the Ring of Cenotes. Local people say that those who drink the tap water fall sick, and there are severe consequences for the area’s biodiversity.

“More than 90% of the 800 pig factories estimated to exist in Yucatán operate without any type of environmental permit,” claims Lourdes Medina Carrillo, an environmental lawyer. “These are projects without a record of prior Indigenous consultation, arising from the destruction of forests considered the second most important on the continent, without permits for changes in land use, and with impacts such as water contamination,” she claims.

For many residents, the anger is directed at the Mexican pork brand Kekén, the country’s largest pork exporter. Animals supplied to the brand are sold all over the world, feeding markets in South Korea, Japan and the US. Kekén is part of the Kuo Group conglomerate, which includes companies in the automotive and chemical industry. It generated revenue of more than $1.9bn (£1.5bn) last year, with half coming from the pork division.

The push into this region of Mexico started with the Nafta free trade agreement but accelerated in the early 2000s after the US health authorities declared Yucatán a zone free of classical swine fever. Export restrictions on pork were removed, and companies quickly moved to take advantage.

As the impact of the mega-farms has grown, residents in Sitilpech have resisted them, forming protests in 2023 against the facilities. But in February 2023, they say they were violently repressed by police who stormed a protest camp, beating those present. Other Maya communities have launched legal disputes against Kekén. At least one of those was upheld by the supreme court, after residents of Homún brought a case detailing “grave and irreversible harm to human health and the environment” caused by a 48,000-pig farm, including “contamination of water … emission of noxious air pollution; the spread of dangerous pathogens”.

“When the company came to settle, we saw how it sadly began to cut down the trees that we take care of so much for beekeeping. They left large areas of devastated land,” allege members of a family from Kinchil, an hour from Yucatán’s capital Mérida. “It was very sad. They cut down trees that were more than 100 years old, which are the ones that benefit us the most when there is drought,” they claim.

At the beginning of last year, the federal Mexican environment ministry found that the watershed around farms in Yucatán was saturated with concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus from the pigs’ excrement.

Analysis of water sample from cenotes, springs and wells in Yucatán by scientists, the communities themselves and the Federal Commission for the Protection against Sanitary Risks (Cofepris) has found contamination by E coli and other bacteria. Communities reported an increase in cases of intestinal infections in Yucatán between 2012 and 2019, a period of pig farm expansion.

In response, a spokesperson for Kekén says it specialises in pork production of the highest quality and is one of the biggest employers in the Yucatán region. The company says it uses biodigesters to ensure the most efficient water uses, adding that 90% of its facilities are in protected areas for the conservation of biodiversity. They said they provided a range of benefits for local people, including supporting farming in nearby Maya communities.

“The medications, the hormones they give to the pigs, in addition to their excrement, end up in the water. And that water that the industry uses then travels inside the caves, the caverns, the wells through the Ring of Cenotes. This is the common water that nature and communities use for their supply. This pollution breaks all ecological balances, impacts native fauna and flora, causes loss of biodiversity and even an excess of organic matter,” says Medina Carrillo.

“This is an extremely serious problem because the aquifer of the peninsula, the wells and cenotes, are interconnected,” she says.

Mexico’s new president, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, said during her campaign that she would not promote the closure of mega-farms in Yucatán. “I understand that there are regulations for pig farms, there is technology to avoid contamination … the issue is that the regulations are complied with,” she declared in a press conference in March. “This idea that mega-farms must be closed because they pollute, no. There is technology.”

An increase in fire ant infestations along Queensland’s Logan River is raising concerns Australia’s worst invasive species could form floating rafts and spread downstream.

The Invasive Species Council advocacy manager, Reece Pianta, said governments should urgently ramp up eradication efforts along the Logan River, in south-east Queensland.

Pianta said the colonies posed a “very high risk” of further spread.

“These fire ants along the Logan river are growing in density and becoming a problem, because they can get into turf, soil and hay, and move to other areas,” he said.

“They can spread in flood events, to land on and reinfest properties where the fire ant colonies had previously been destroyed.”

The invasive insects can float on flood waters by forming large balls or floating rafts. The fire ants can lock their legs together and form air pockets to protect the queen and her eggs.

Once they arrived on dry land, they can reform their colonies in new locations, Pianta said.

“In Queensland, we’ve just come off a couple of weeks of fairly solid rain, and we’re starting to see our first evidence of fire ants rafting,” he said.

“Our concern is that suppression doesn’t seem to be working because the fire ant infestation numbers are growing in that zone,” Pianta said. “More resources are clearly needed, more community engagement and probably some federal government funding support.”

Fire ant incursions into New South Wales have occurred since late 2023. In November this year, the NSW government placed a temporary suspension on turf movements from heavily infested areas of south-east Queensland, after the pests were found in turf delivered to Clunes, near Byron Bay.

“Fire ants won’t march into NSW; they will either be carried with materials such as soil, mulch, hay and turf, or fly in by natural spread from Queensland. Which is why we’re ramping up surveillance in these high-risk areas,” the NSW agriculture minister, Tara Moriarty, said at the time.

First detected in Queensland in 2001, fire ants were considered one of the worst invasive species to reach Australia, according to the federal government. They damaged agriculture and wildlife, inflicted painful stings on people and animals, and restricted everyday outdoor activities like picnics and sporting events.

In previous years, the ants have used flooding in Queensland to spread into new areas, as rafts are deposited by rivers or flood waters.

Foreign multinational companies are extracting billions of litres of water from British aquifers to sell as bottled water, the Guardian can reveal.

Coca-Cola extracts the largest amount of freshwater of any drinks company in England, the data obtained through freedom of information legislation shows. It has a licence to extract 1.59bn litres of water a year from boreholes in Sidcup, Kent for its soft drinks. On top of that, it has the right to take 377m litres for its bottled water brands Glaceau Smartwater and Abbey Well from Morpeth in Northumberland.

The French company Sources Alma is one of the biggest players in the UK water market, supplying bottled water to Tesco and Asda as well as producing its own Aqua Pura brand. Through its British subsidiary Roxane, it has the right to extract 1.5bn litres annually from Armathwaite in Cumbria, where it bottles Tesco’s Ashbeck water. It also bottles large quantities of water in Staffordshire, where it produces Tesco’s Elmhurst brand, but this spring water is supplied by a third company – South Staffordshire Water plc – so the quantities are not publicly available.

The Swiss giant Nestlé Waters has the right to extract a total of 880m litres of water for its brands Buxton and Pure Life from its sites in Derbyshire and Pembrokeshire, where it took over the Welsh company Princes Gate in 2018.

Also in Derbyshire is Germany’s Schwarz, which bottles water for Lidl, with a licence to pump up 700m litres a year. Meanwhile, the French company Danone has bought Harrogate Spring Water, where it can extract 460m litres a year.

In Scotland, Highland Spring is dominant. Its licence allows it to take 1.85bn litres a year from the Speyside Glenlivet crown estate in the Scottish Highlands. Highland Spring is owned by Mahdi Al Tajir, a Bahrain-born billionaire businessman and Scotland’s richest man. Highland Spring said that it only extracted 32% of the amount allowed by its licence and that it had detected “no discernible impact on the rivers and groundwater levels due to abstraction”.

The UK trade body, the Natural Source Water Association, says bottled water represents a tiny fraction of all water abstracted in Britain: in England it is 0.05%, Scotland 0.2% and Wales 0.08%. “For natural source water companies, the water they abstract is the precious commodity at the centre of their operations so they are very careful how they use it,” it said in a statement.

However, the UN special rapporteur for water, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, said that, although the bottling industry used relatively small amounts of water compared with other industries such as intensive agriculture or mining, “the issue is that bottled water companies are taking the best quality drinking water”.

As reported in the Guardian, during droughts in Spain and Latin America, populations have run out of drinking water and have had to buy bottled water from foreign companies who have extracted it from their own national territory. In times of shortage, if governments prioritise giving concessions to private bottling companies, Arrojo-Agudo says, “this can put at risk the availability of this higher quality water for public supply”.

During the UK’s hot summer of 2022, farmers in Ludchurch, Wales, complained that they faced water restrictions while Nestlé continued to extract millions of litres of local water.

Nestlé Waters said: “Nestlé is a founding member of the Alliance for Water Stewardship (AWS). Our bottling site in Buxton was the first site in the UK to achieve a platinum certification – the highest level available. The Princes Gate site in Pembrokeshire is set to undergo the AWS audit in 2025.”

The bottled water market is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few multinationals, which have bought up many local brands. Five companies account for 83% of bottled water sales in the UK, according to the consultants Zenith Global. Roxane (owned by Sources Alma) has a 38% market share, Nestlé 14%, Highland Spring 12% and Danone 10%. The fifth – the British-owned company Shepley Spring – has a 9% share of the UK market. Operating through a third company, it has the right to extract almost 600m litres a year in Yorkshire, where it bottles water for Morrisons, Booker, Iceland and Amazon, as well as its own brands Ice Valley and White Rock.

In Britain, there are three types of bottled water. Products sold as “natural mineral water” and “spring water” must come from an underground natural source and be bottled at that source. Unlike mineral water, spring water does not need a guaranteed mineral composition and may be treated to remove or add substances. Products sold as “bottled water” can come from a variety of sources, including tap water. The figures in this article do not include water taken from the municipal public water system, that is to say tap water.

Worldwide, Coca-Cola sells more bottled water than any other company, according to Euromonitor International. Nestlé’s Pure Life is the biggest-selling single brand.

The Environment Agency said: “Water bottling licences come with strict conditions to ensure the environment is protected. Where there is risk of damage to the environment, we have the power to amend or revoke existing licences. These licences currently represent less than 1% of total abstraction licences.”

A little-known, far-right populist took the lead in Romania’s presidential election on Sunday, electoral data showed, and will probably face leftist prime minister Marcel Ciolacu in a runoff in two weeks, an outcome that has rocked the country’s political landscape.

Calin Georgescu, who ran independently, led the polls with about 22% of the vote after nearly 93% of votes were counted, while Ciolacu of the Social Democratic party, or PSD, trailed at 21%. Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union party, or USR, stood at about 18%, and George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians, or AUR, took about 14%.

After polls closed, 9.4 million people – about 52.4% of eligible voters – had cast ballots, according to the Central Election Bureau. The second round of the vote will be held on 8 December.

The president serves a five-year term and has significant decision-making powers in areas such as national security, foreign policy and judicial appointments in the European Union and Nato member country.

Georgescu, 62, ran independently and was not widely known. He outperformed most local surveys, sending shock waves through Romania’s political establishment as he ascended to pole position.

After casting his ballot on Sunday, Georgescu said in a post on Facebook that he voted “For the unjust, for the humiliated, for those who feel they do not matter and actually matter the most … the vote is a prayer for the nation.”

Cristian Andrei, a political consultant based in Bucharest, told The Associated Press that Georgescu’s unexpected poll performance appears to be a “large protest or revolt against the establishment.”

“The mainstream political parties have lost the connection with regular Romanians,” he said. “You don’t have strong candidates or strong leaders … there are weak candidates, weak leaders, and the parties in general are pretty much disconnected.

Georgescu lacks an agenda, Andrei said, and has a vague and populist manifesto with positions that are “beyond the normal discourse.” His stances include supporting Romanian farmers, reducing dependency on imports, and ramping up energy and food production.

Georgescu has called Nato’s ballistic missile defense shield in the Romanian town of Deveselu a “shame of diplomacy”. He has said the North Atlantic alliance will not protect any of its members should they be attacked by Russia.

According to his website, Georgescu holds a doctorate in pedology, a branch of soil science, and held different positions in Romania‘s environment ministry in the 1990s. Between 1999 and 2012, he was a representative for Romania on the national committee of the United Nations Environment Program.

Videos posted to his popular TikTok account, where he has amassed 1.6 million likes, depict him attending church, doing judo, running around an oval track, and speaking on podcasts.

Romania shares a 650-km (400-mile) border with Ukraine and since Russia attacked Kyiv in 2022, it has enabled the export of millions of tons of grain through its Black Sea port of Constanta and provided military aid, including the donation of a Patriot air defence battery.

Villages on the border with Ukraine have seen a barrage of drones breaching national airspace although no casualties have been reported.

One political commentator said Russian meddling to give Georgescu an edge could not be ruled out in the election.

“Based on Georgescu’s stance towards Ukraine and the discrepancy between opinion surveys and the actual result, we cannot rule (that) out,” said Sergiu Miscoiu, a political science professor at Babes-Bolyai University.

Ecaterina Nawadia, a 20-year-old architecture student, said she voted for the first time in a national election on Sunday and hoped young people turn out in high numbers.

“Since the (1989) revolution, we didn’t have a really good president,” she said. “I hope most of the people my age went to vote … because the leading candidate is not the best option.”

Romania will also hold parliamentary elections on 1 December that will determine the country’s next government and prime minister.

Andrei, the political consultant, said Romania’s large budget deficit, high inflation, and an economic slowdown could push more mainstream candidates to shift toward populist stances amid widespread dissatisfaction.

Ciolacu told the AP before the first-round vote that one of his biggest goals was “to convince Romanians that it is worth staying at home or returning” to Romania, which has a massive diaspora spread throughout EU countries.

With Associated Press and Reuters

Well, something to work on there then, Ruben. It would be tempting at the end of this decelerating game of semi-football to talk about Ruben Amorim at least realising the scale of the job he faces.

Except, given Amorim almost certainly possesses a TV set and is interested in football, he already knows the scale of the job. And the scale is: really very big indeed.

It’s not the scale though. It’s the tone, the texture, the deathly spirit of this United team that really needs to be digested in the flesh, the sheer joyless incoherence, a Manchester United team that is all trapped energy and broken patterns, the football equivalent of a chipped gravy boat handed down unhappily through the generations.

It was there in the hilariously ambling patterns of Joshua Zirkzee, who just seems always to be floating around quite close to the spectacle, like a man listening to a podcast while strolling on the local rec, tactfully avoiding the dogwalkers.

It was there in a fascinating interlude on 24 minutes as United ferried the ball around sleepily, the backline completely failing to intersect with the midfield in front of it, no angles, no pockets to shift past the press. Watching this, Amorim looked calm, poker faced, right up to the moment you looked at his feet and he seemed to be trying to stand on tip toes, doing some kind of secretive hyper-clenched thigh workout, swallowing it down. He spread his arms wide as another pass shuttled across the face of the penalty area, possession without hunger or drive or purpose, football happening in a vacuum.

With this in mind, for United’s fans the most heartening aspect of this deathly 1-1 draw with Ipswich is that Amorim very clearly gets this. “We are going to suffer for a long period,” he shrugged, smiling just a little bit wearily in his post-match press conference at Portman Road. The job is huge, overwhelming, perhaps even insoluble. The first positive step is knowing all these things for certain. And Amorim’s players did him a favour in that respect here. He is, if nothing else, utterly free from any kind of illusions.

From the start there was something lovely and windswept and vaguely Jane Austen about travelling through the Suffolk countryside to meet a handsome man with brooding eyes who has been charged with reviving a grand old ailing estate.

The three-week hiatus between appointment and full match-day rein-taking had given this occasion a sense of delayed intrigue, nine days of intense tactical edging about wing-backs and centre-half partnerships.

There was a slight sense of double take about Amorim’s starting XI . OK. So, we’re going new energy, freshness, unforgiving demands on press and movement and structure. We’re going – it says here – with Casemiro, Christian Eriksen and Jonny Evans.

But it only took 82 seconds for everything to be all right, with a goal that came entirely from the Amorim rejig. Amad Diallo at right wing-back? Yep. We can do that too. Here he took the ball close to halfway and went straight into a full, ravenous, high rev sprint. The low cross with his newly empowered right foot was perfectly measured. Marcus Rashford just had to walk the ball into the net.

Amorim’s reaction was perfect, in that there was no reaction, just a swivel back towards the bench, a flicker perhaps in the eyes. Rashford seemed out of sorts in those early moments. That is, he seemed hungry, energised and furiously mobile. He sprinted after lost passes, fouled and harried.

And for a while, as United had their best spell, there was a chance to linger on that vital quality, the Amorim touchline energy. There was an aura from the start, striding out in heavy-tog quilted coat, white trainers, skinny tailored slacks, off-the-peg Euro football royalty uniform. The package is good.

Jawline, hair, the controlled energy in his movements.

The United away support, which is always noisy, got to roll around and bounce and sing about the 12 Cantonas of Christmas. It didn’t last. Ipswich pressed back with real purpose, a process that is always easier when you find no resistance, a gap, a space to press into.

United’s midfield structure was odd, porous, leaving pathways that Ipswich began to trace, moving in neat triangles between the static parts. The equaliser was always coming, and it was fitting Omari Hutchison should score it after a sublime, high-craft first half.

Either side André Onana produced not one but two astonishing point-blank saves from Liam Delap. Delap is a wonderful spectacle in the flesh, a huge, thick barrelling figure, charging about as though he’s barely in control of his own gravity, a man always chasing a round of cheese down a Gloucestershire hillside. He really should have decided this game.

Amorim didn’t sit down through all of this. He didn’t scream and shout and point. Instead he paced, hands bunched in his pockets, in an ever shrinking arc from left to right. Somebody needs to take a cleaver to this thing. Amorim may have a kind of Left Bank soulfulness about him, soft deep brown eyes, the perfectly cropped bristles. But he is also clear-eyed and ruthless. And yes, he really is going to need all of that.

A British national has reportedly been captured by Russia’s forces in the Kursk region while fighting for Ukraine.

In a video posted on pro-war Russian Telegram channels on Sunday, a man wearing combat fatigues identifies himself as 22-year-old James Scott Rhys Anderson from the UK.

The man, speaking with an English accent, says that he served as a signalman in the British army until 2023 before joining the International Legion in Ukraine to fight against Russia.

In the footage, which has not been verified, the captured man appears with his hands tied. It is unclear when the clip was recorded.

Since the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, issued a call in February 2022 for foreigners to join the fight, thousands of people from around the world have travelled to Ukraine. Many have joined units such as the International Legion, known as the most selective of the foreign groups and operating as part of a military unit within the Ukrainian ground forces.

Yuri Podolyaka, a popular pro-Kremlin military blogger, wrote on Telegram that Anderson was captured near the village of Plekhovo in Russia’s Kursk region.

Russia usually claims that the foreign fighters it has captured are mercenaries and are not entitled to protection as prisoners of war under international law.

The UK Foreign Office said it was “supporting the family of a British man following reports of his detention”.

The Ministry of Defence has declined to comment at this stage.

Russian forces have been battling Ukrainian troops in the Kursk region since 6 August, when Kyiv surprised Moscow with the biggest foreign attack on Russian soil since the second world war and subsequently seized 100 villages over an area of more than 1,300 sq km.

On Sunday, Reuters reported that Ukraine had lost more than 40% of the territory it initially captured in the Kursk region after Russian forces, bolstered by 11,000 North Korean troops, launched a wave of counter-offensives.

In the summer of 2022, two Britons captured while fighting in Mariupol as members of Ukraine’s marines were sentenced to death following a show trial in a court in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine.

The men were later released as part of a prisoner swap between Russia and Ukraine that was brokered by Saudi Arabia.

It was plainly too good to be true. Or to last. There were 82 seconds on the stadium clock when the Ruben Amorim era at Manchester United was jumpstarted. The new manager had put his faith in Marcus Rashford in the No 9 role and it was United’s great enigma who put them in front. Rashford charged about in the early running, a point to prove.

And yet it was the prompt for a slow retreat by United for the remainder of the first half. The structure was different, United set up in Amorim’s trademark 3-4-2-1, but the players were the same, along with plenty of the frustrations and faultlines from Erik ten Hag’s tenure. Control proved elusive. As it did so often under Ten Hag.

Ipswich were the better team before the interval and the excellent Omari Hutchinson got the goal they deserved before the end of it with a shot from distance that took a deflection off Noussair Mazraoui. Ipswich had won for the first time this season at Tottenham before the international break. This was in point-gained territory for them.

Not so for United. After all of the talking and, goodness gracious, there has been some talking, Amorim’s arrival feeling like the coming of the messiah, it was time for United to fire some optimism. They could not do it. They were a bit better in the second period but not hugely and it looked as though the players had too much to process in terms of instructions. It all became stilted. Then again, as everyone knows, least of all Amorim, it will take time. He has only had two training sessions with the full squad.

United had risen one place in the table on Saturday without playing – evidence, the club’s support hoped, of Amorim’s magic – and there was always going to be a spotlight on his first starting XI. Amorim talked on Friday about the need to “adapt some players” because he did not have the right profiles for his three-at-the-back system and there were a few square pegs in round holes, especially the left-footed attacking midfielder Amad Diallo at right wing-back.

Amorim did not have three fit specialist centre-halves – there were four out with injuries – and so it was the full-back, Mazraoui, on the right of the back three. Casemiro and Christian Eriksen in central midfield did not scream revolution. Or pace and intensity.

Talk about the dream start, an element of vindication, because it was Diallo who made the goal. He moved smartly through the gears up the right wing and, having slipped a tackle from Jens Cajuste, his low cross was made to measure for Rashford. The travelling United fans had chorused Amorim’s name after 30 seconds. They belted it out on loop for the next couple of minutes.

Ipswich stabilised. It was clear that Hutchinson had the beating of Casemiro and Jonny Evans, who played on the left of United’s back three. Hutchinson, in the right-sided No 10 role, was sharp with his turns and very quick.

Amorim was a presence at the edge of his technical area. This is what coaching on the hoof looks like and it had to alarm him that United sank deeper. They looked to hurt Ipswich with long diagonal passes but it was the home team that took a grip on the midfield.

The equaliser had been advertised, André Onana busy in the United goal. He had pushed away a first-time hit from Sammie Szmodics in the 11th minute but the big save came in the countdown to half-time. Leif Davis stepped inside Diallo and he waited for the move of Liam Delap, putting the ball on a plate for him. Eight yards out, Delap put his foot through it only for Onana to throw out a big right hand, Peter Schmeichel-style, to block.

United’s reprieve did not last long. Inevitably, it was Hutchinson, checking away from Casemiro on the right-hand edge of the area, quick feet to the fore. His curler flicked off Mazraoui’s head to deceive Onana on its way in.

United pressed more on to the front foot after the restart, although they might have conceded when Delap tricked away from Matthijs de Ligt and surged through the middle. De Ligt looked awfully slow. Delap went right to Wes Burns and sprinted to meet the cross, his spectacular flick kept out by Onana.

Alejandro Garnacho had worked Arijanet Muric from a tight angle at the start of the second half. And there was the moment on 54 minutes when he led a break with Rashford available inside for the pass, Cajuste the only Ipswich defender. Garnacho looked for Rashford; Cajuste made the crucial interception.

Amorim searched for the solution. He got Luke Shaw on at left centre-half for his first football of the season, ordering him to stay close to Hutchinson. Manuel Ugarte replaced Casemiro. It was Rasmus Højlund for Rashford and Joshua Zirkzee was introduced in the right-sided No 10 role, Bruno Fernandes dropping back into midfield. There was a late sighting of Mason Mount, who came on for Garnacho.

United could not make it happen. Fernandes curled a free-kick inches wide and it might have been worse for them if the Ipswich substitute, Conor Chaplin, had shot either side of Onana from a cross by another replacement, Jack Clarke. Not for the first time, Onana stood tall.

For a moment, Mohamed Salah’s shirt was gone with the wind, resting somewhere on the edge of the Southampton box. He had whipped it off, bearing his lean, cartoonish torso in filthy conditions as he celebrated his second goal, from the penalty spot, to open up an eight-point lead at the summit of the Premier League, in front of the visiting Liverpool supporters going berserk in a pocket of this stadium. Then Luis Díaz retrieved Salah’s No 11.

On the face of it, at kick-off this was a mismatch between the teams top and bottom of the division but Liverpool, who opened the scoring through Dominik Szoboszlai, trailed to goals by Adam Armstrong and the impressive Mateus Fernandes. But Salah restored parity, struck the winner and then hit a post late on to leave Arne Slot’s side admiring the view. Slot’s businesslike thumbs up to the away end at the final whistle was the crowning moment, though they will have to improve when Real Madrid come to town on Wednesday.

There were plenty of positives for Russell Martin but ultimately this was another dispiriting defeat, an encouraging performance undone by individual errors. The Southampton manager has been wrestling to find a winning formula to avert an immediate return to the Championship and made five changes, handing the 6ft 7in striker Paul Onuachu his first league start in 18 months, since Saints were relegated last year, while Ryan Fraser was given the daunting task of shackling Salah from left wing-back. Alex McCarthy had a nervy game after replacing the injured Aaron Ramsdale in goal. The accusation levelled at Martin since he began life in the dugout at MK Dons in League One has been his teams’ tendency to overplay and the slapstick if not comical manner of Liverpool’s goal on the half-hour only served to add another log to the raging fire of debate.

Martin does not wish for Saints to self-sabotage. McCarthy rolled the ball to Fernandes and pointed upfield, seemingly not accounting for the traffic on the midfielder’s radar. Fernandes, hounded by Curtis Jones, passed the ball to Flynn Downes, standing on his goalline. He panicked in possession and hurried a half-baked clearance straight to Szoboszlai, who took a touch to compose himself before lining up a majestic finish. Martin shook his head and winced after Szoboszlai caressed an unerring left-foot shot in off a post. Downes almost immediately made amends, drawing a fine save from Caoimhín Kelleher.

“I ask them to play quickly so I take responsibility for that,” Martin said. “I think the players who were in the Premier League [with Southampton] last time feel very differently about this season. We have to eradicate those moments to give ourselves a chance.”

Onuachu had been a handful, earning olés from the home support, and Liverpool will have welcomed his premature exit with a hamstring problem after colliding with Cody Gakpo six minutes into the second half. The only problem for Liverpool was that Southampton still had Tyler Dibling on the pitch. The 18-year-old, who made his England Under-21 debut last week, has been Saints’ beacon of light during a draining few months. Dibling excelled on his Premier League debut against Manchester United in September, his direct running causing havoc and he won a penalty which Cameron Archer failed to convert.

Dibling won another spot-kick here, haring forward after seizing on a rare lapse by Virgil van Dijk and drawing a crunch from Andy Robertson. The referee, Samuel Barrett, pointed to the spot. This time, after the VAR, Michael Oliver, in a hoodie at Stockley Park, concluded the foul occurred on the edge of the 18-yard box – some angles appeared to show first contact happened just outside the area – Armstrong stepped up. His penalty was poor and allowed Kelleher, diving to his right, to repel his effort, but the striker sent the rebound through the goalkeeper’s legs to level.

Dibling was at the forefront of every Saints attack and the catalyst for the superb counter that culminated in Kelleher fishing the ball out of his net 11 minutes after the interval. A move that inadvertently began with McCarthy fumbling a Liverpool corner ended with Fernandes neatly side-footing home Armstrong’s cross. Fraser had released Dibling, who on the touchline exquisitely checked back to eliminate Szoboszlai. Dibling then freed Armstrong, who lured Robertson, Ibrahima Konaté – who struggled all game – and Conor Bradley with him, then kept his cool to locate Fernandes, who calmly did the rest. The Portuguese has been another big plus.

However Southampton, enterprising going forward but vulnerable at the back, have a habit of leaking points. Liverpool’s equaliser was another sickener. Ryan Gravenberch sent a routine pass down the right channel, over the top of Kyle Walker-Peters, and McCarthy rushed from his goal to meet it. By the time it dawned on McCarthy that it may not have been the best move, it was too late as Salah cutely zipped the ball past him and into a gaping net.

McCarthy, to his credit, helped Southampton survive a few more hairy episodes but then the substitute Yuki Sugawara gifted the visitors another chance, handling Salah’s cross at the back post. The man himself buried his spot-kick.