Don’t panic. Stay calm. The advice from Virgil van Dijk and Curtis Jones was Zen-like in its reassurance in midweek as Liverpool digested back-to-back defeats for the second time under Arne Slot.
Slot remained relaxed and upbeat on Friday too, sprinkling his press conference with several unprompted reminders that the team he was defending from rare criticism are top of the Premier League. Again. But behind the soothing messages and positive league table there are undeniable issues with Liverpool’s form that, according to Slot himself, run deeper than the opening 10 games of the campaign.
The Premier League champions have not been struggling to create chances from open play or to turn dominant possession into convincing victories since August, their head coach insisted. They have been struggling to do both since the middle of last season, once opponents adjusted their tactics to stifle Liverpool, and are yet to find solutions. It was some admission from the coach of a team that cruised to the title with four games to spare in April and has been enhanced by a £420m summer spending spree. And, yes, that investment does increase scrutiny as well as expectation.
“We were very happy winning the league,” said Slot. “But we didn’t shut our eyes for the second part of the season to how many times we needed a set piece [to win]. That is not something bad because Arsenal and Chelsea are needing a set piece almost every single game at the moment. We’ve brought in a very different midfielder than we had last season [Florian Wirtz], which we think we needed because there was a big, big difference between the amount of goals we found from open play in the first part of last season and the second part of last season.”
Statistics back up Slot. In the first 19 league games of his debut season Liverpool scored 47 goals with 40 (85.1%) coming from open play. Over the final 19 league games Liverpool scored 39 goals, of which 27 (69.2%) were from open play. The drop-off has been corrected this term, over a small sample size admittedly, with 10 of Liverpool’s 12 league goals scored from open play (83.3%). But Slot’s side stayed out in front over the final 19 games of last season thanks in no small part to eight set-piece goals (20.5% of the total), excluding penalties. This season’s set-piece tally, excluding penalties, is one (8.3%).
But Liverpool’s performances this season, notably the defeats at Crystal Palace and Galatasaray in the space of four days, cannot be attributed to a decline in set-piece prowess alone. Even their seven-game winning streak before heading to Selhurst Park was often accompanied by the caveat that Liverpool won late and/or despite an inconsistent display.
Wirtz is yet to adapt to the intensity of the Premier League and is a £100m talent that Slot is still trying to accommodate to maximum effect. Liverpool’s new full-backs, Jeremie Frimpong and Milos Kerkez, were staunchly defended by their head coach before the Galatasaray defeat but are not currently at the levels of the players they replaced, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Andy Robertson. Alexander Isak is not match sharp having spent the summer on strike at Newcastle, and Ibrahima Konaté’s form has deserted him. The list goes on. Only Hugo Ekitiké, Van Dijk, Alisson, who will miss Saturday’s trip to Chelsea with a hamstring injury, Dominik Szoboszlai and Ryan Gravenberch have performed consistently well this term.
Liverpool desperately need Alexis Mac Allister to regain full fitness and his influence over their rhythm, composure and penetration. The Argentina international was left out of the final two games of last season to start his recovery from a persistent groin injury and return fit for pre-season. At least that was the plan. The midfielder’s rehabilitation took longer than anticipated, pre-season was frequently interrupted as a consequence, and a vital cog in Slot’s machine has not completed 90 minutes for his club since the 1-0 win at Leicester on 20 April. “You say he’s playing catchup,” Slot said. “In Holland we say he walks behind the music.” Liverpool will be a different proposition once Mac Allister is conducting midfield alongside Gravenberch again.
Slot has extolled the virtues of flexibility in his new-look squad, with the summer arrivals Wirtz, Ekitiké, Isak and Frimpong able to play in a variety of positions, but a team in transition could do with more consistency in selection to speed the process. Slot insists his changes in personnel have been enforced and there will be no change in his approach.
“I don’t think we do things differently but I see teams doing a lot of things differently against us,” he said. “Jürgen [Klopp] gave me a lot of gifts but one of the gifts he gave me was ending up third the year before and fifth the year before that, and him being so well-known that a new manager came in and everyone thought: ‘Oh, let’s start to play against Liverpool.’ Teams played in a completely different way in the first half of the season against us than they did when we were top of the league after half of the season.
“It is purely about how teams play against us in style and mentality. In Istanbul, [it looked as if] Galatasaray won the Champions League. If you look at Palace, you look at Galatasaray, how much they throw themselves in front of a ball, these things make it harder for us to score from open play than it was in the first part of last season. This is something I already saw last season. That’s why we had the window we had: sometimes to replace, sometimes to add a certain quality.
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“It’s up to us to show that we can do better in these kind of games than we did in the second part of last season and the first part of this season. In the meantime, we almost won every single game, right? But the margins are not the same any more as the first part of the season: 3-0 Brentford at home, 6-3 Tottenham and 5-0 West Ham.”
Liverpool possess enough world-class talent to correct their unconvincing form, as Jones stated this week, but Slot admits the solution is more complex than waiting for Wirtz and Isak to hit their stride. Stamford Bridge would be a good place to start, however.
“It’s a combination of things,” Slot said. “How do we find our wingers? Do we find them often enough and in promising situations like we did against Galatasaray? This is what we have to work on and this is what we have to do better than we’ve done until now.
“We unlocked teams in the second half of last season by scoring from seven corner kicks. The team we face tomorrow [Chelsea] have scored more than 50% of their goals from set pieces, although they are on eight points. The No 2 in the league [Arsenal] has scored 60% of their goals from set pieces. So they have the same issues if they face a low block, but the way to unlock a low block is to do better.
“We have to find ways of unlocking that, maybe scoring the first chance we get or from a set piece. I think there are enough positives to take from this season. If you talk about open-play goals, we’ve done much better in the first part of this season than the second part of last season. But there are things we definitely have to improve. I’m the first one to acknowledge that.”
