Arne Slot gets Liverpool wish as two players deliver exactly what he asked for vs Frankfurt

Arne Slot got exactly what he asked for in the first half against Eintracht Frankfurt in the Champions League, despite his side falling a goal behind against the Bundesliga outfit.

Hugo Ekitike, playing against his old club, leveled the scores before Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate crashed home headers from Cody Gakpo and Dominik Szoboszlai's crosses.

Slot has spoken at length in recent weeks about the need to get better at dead balls. In tight games, he has repeatedly said, how you defend and attack from them can make a big difference. With Liverpool in need, Van Dijk and Konate stepped up.

"The few chances we conceded led to two goals and again, a set-piece is partly the reason why we lost the game," Slot said after his side lost to Manchester United at the weekend.

"If you lose a game of football, especially after you have lost four, maybe I should not talk about that.

"No excuses. We have had more than enough chances to score a goal.

"I don't want to talk about (the referee). We had so many chances ourselves that we should have taken and we need to score more.

"If you are 1-1 and the game is completely there for you and you have to defend one set-piece, defend it better than we did."

Arsenal, of course, has been the specialist team when it comes to set-pieces in the last couple of seasons. But Liverpool scored a few vital ones in the second half of last season.

In recent weeks, Slot has outlined the need to score more from those kind of situations because teams are more willing than ever to sit in and defend deep against Liverpool.

That means the number of open play goals that the Reds are able to muster is unlikely to be as high as it was when he first came into the club at the start of the 2024/25 campaign.

In part, that was the reason that the likes of Florian Wirtz and Hugo Ekitike were bought during the summer — to ensure that there is as much creativity as possible.

Adding set-pieces back into the mix, however, is another big step in the right direction after a run of tricky results.

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