Arne Slot denies Danny Murphy's Liverpool assessment following their first Premier League defeat
Liverpool suffered their first defeat in the Arne Slot era against Nottingham Forest, but the Dutchman does not agree with Danny Murphy's reasoning for Saturday's Anfield reverse.
Arne Slot disagrees with Danny Murphy's view that the international break was to blame for Liverpool's defeat to Nottingham Forest. The Dutchman suffered his first defeat since taking over as manager of the Reds on Saturday. It was a sad afternoon for the Reds as Forest won at Anfield thanks to a goal from Callum Hudson-Odoi. It also saw Slot's flawless start with the club come to an end in less than encouraging circumstances. Murphy, an ex-Liverpool player, discussed the setback and speculated that the club's stars' frantic international break may have played a role.
"If he [Slot] wasn't convinced before, he would now understand how competitive the Premier League is. But don't worry, there are still plenty of positives for Liverpool; it's been a terrific start. But Slot refuses to make excuses for his side. While he acknowledges that the international break may have tired his men out, he does not feel it was the cause of the defeat. Following the full-time whistle, the Dutchman stated: "It's always difficult, but I don't think [the break] had anything to do with it. Players came back strong, and I saw today a team that was willing to battle to the end. That was not about energy. We simply possessed the ball, so we had a lot of opportunities to create with it.
"If you look at the goals we've scored so far, we've scored a lot of them in transition after gaining the ball back, but the other club (Forest) played over our press a lot with long balls. We typically got the ball in our final line. "It wasn't good enough today because too many individual performances in ball possession were not up to the standards that I'm used to from these players." He continued, "The only thing we had control over was ball possession because they played a lot of long balls, so if you take the ball back, you have to pass 11 players.
"We had a lot of ball possession but only managed to produce three or four decent chances. That's far from enough. If you have so much possession and play so much in their half, we need to improve significantly; we lost the ball so many times in basic scenarios. That's the primary takeaway from the game: ball possession was insufficient. Slot will be hoping that Liverpool can recover over the next week as their congested fixture schedule takes hold. The Reds begin their Champions League campaign against AC Milan on Tuesday, followed by a home encounter against Bournemouth next weekend.
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