Liverpool will not change attacking style despite recent slump, says Slot

Arne Slot has said the Liverpool hierarchy share his views on the reasons for the team’s slump and he will not abandon an attacking style in search of a way out. The head coach admitted that six defeats in seven games was unacceptable before Aston Villa’s visit on Saturday and denied making excuses for Liverpool’s worst domestic run in 72 years.

Slot accepted the pressure was on before his makeshift team exited the Carabao Cup against Crystal Palace on Wednesday. That pressure to arrest the slide, however, is not, he insisted, coming from Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, FSG’s chief executive of football, Michael Edwards, or the sporting director, Richard Hughes, after a summer transfer outlay of almost £450m.

“They say similar things,” said Slot, whose team next week face Real Madrid in the Champions League and travel to Manchester City in the Premier League. “I speak mainly to Richard and once in a while to the others. They also see similar things as what I see. For me the conversations haven’t changed a lot. We always talk about the game and it’s always nicer to talk about the game if you have won than if you have lost.”

Slot believes Liverpool “have an unbelievable squad if they are all fit and all ready for the programme we are facing”. He said the summer investment in players such as Florian Wirtz and Alexander Isak, who is expected to be sidelined again against Villa through injury, had left the club “in such a good place for the short-term future and the long-term future”.

Asked why his team were taking so long to gel, he replied: “You don’t really help me. ‘Why, why, why?’ I give an explanation and people say I’m coming up with excuses. I can come up with five or six reasons why we are not winning as much or losing as much as we do but, as I say every time, there are never enough excuses to have a run of form as we had now. No matter if I could come up with 200 excuses, when you are Liverpool you cannot lose – for me – five out of six, but the reality is six out of seven [Slot was discounting the Palace defeat from Liverpool’s recent run].

“There will never be enough reasons but when I came last season all players were fit, and all players had – as a minimum – one year of Premier League experience. So they know what it is to play during the week and then go to Brentford on Saturday. And they were all fit and stayed fit. We had our issues in pre-season [this summer] with players not being fit and players who came in later. It has been more of a struggle to keep them fit or get them all fit.”

Only Burnley (21) have faced more big chances from open play this season than Liverpool (19). The league leaders, Arsenal, have faced two. Yet Slot denies the champions have been too open and claims there is no reason to sacrifice his attacking principles for a more pragmatic style after 10 games without a clean sheet. “I don’t see us conceding a lot of chances so I don’t see a reason to change our playing style completely but we need to do better in not conceding goals,” he said.

“Against [Manchester] United, how many chances did we concede? Against [Eintracht] Frankfurt when we were 3-1 up, we hardly conceded a shot on target. In all the games we played until now we haven’t conceded a lot of chances. Not at all. We do give away a bit more than last season but that has to do with us being 1-0 down so you take a bit more risk. But in general I don’t think that our issue is that we concede too many chances. Our issue is we don’t score the chances we create.”

Click here to read article