Slot adamant on Liverpool not changing their attacking style despite their current predicament ahead of Villa game.
Liverpool will not change attacking style despite recent slump, says Slot.
Arne Slot has stated that the Liverpool management agrees with him regarding the causes of the team’s poor performance and that he won’t give up on an offensive approach in an effort to find a solution. Before Aston Villa’s visit on Saturday, the head coach acknowledged that six losses in seven games was unsatisfactory, but he refuted any justifications for Liverpool’s worst domestic run in 72 years.
Before his improvised squad lost to Crystal Palace in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday, Slot acknowledged the pressure was on. However, he emphasised that the pressure to stop the decline is not coming from Richard Hughes, the sporting director, Michael Edwards, the chief executive of football at FSG, or Liverpool’s owner, Fenway Sports Group, following an almost £450 million summer transfer expenditure.
“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.”