In the 8th round of the Premier League, Liverpool lost 1-2 at home to Manchester United and suffered four consecutive losses in all competitions. After the game, Red Army coach Slott attended the press conference and talked about his views on the game and the performance of individual players.
Are you worried about the team losing confidence after four consecutive losses? Is this the biggest challenge in your coaching career?
I think as a head coach, you are always facing various challenges. When I first started coaching, I faced the challenge of being a new manager and I needed to win. When you do well, you go to a big club and people say: "Oh, let's see what he does there." Then you become Jurgen Klopp's successor and people say that's your biggest challenge. Now we have lost four games in a row, which is also a challenge. Therefore, the career of a football coach is a continuous challenge. When you win a game, you want to keep winning, and when you lose a game, you want to start winning again.
Have we lost faith? I haven't felt it yet. Because in every loss we created a lot of chances in the second half. Looking back at the three games we have lost so far in the Premier League and looking at all the highlights together, you will feel that it is almost impossible to lose. Therefore, if we can maintain our current performance and do better in some details, then we have every reason to expect to win again. But I can't guarantee that we're going to create eight or nine or 10 great scoring opportunities during the week, although I hope so, with the players we have, ultimately it will help us score more goals.
Although no one asked, I also want to mention that in addition to the two goals we conceded, we probably gave our opponents two or three chances, which is the dilemma we faced when we were 0-1 behind, when you have to take more risks. Even so, I still think we limited the opponent's ability to create chances to the greatest extent because we did take a lot of risks at that moment. By about 55 minutes into the game, I think we had six or seven offensive players on the field. Maybe that’s not an excuse, but it could be the reason why our structure at set-pieces is not as perfect as usual. Normally we would have four or five or even six defensive players, but at that moment we had seven or eight offensive players on the field. No excuse, but they should have done better and we should have done better and it's probably not a coincidence that in these particular moments we were conceding points from set pieces.
Talking about Gakpo hitting the door frame three times
He not only scored a goal, but also created threats many times, but we only focused on those obvious scoring opportunities. I also noticed that some crosses were close to scoring chances and if you won the game you could say the margin was small and people would believe you and they would say: "Yeah, but you still won." But if you say that now, people will think it's an excuse. When we were tied 2-2 at home with Manchester United last season, Maguire had a better chance but failed to seize it, and this time he scored. Gakpo had other opportunities in this game. The goal he scored may not be his best, but the goal he scored is the most important. Incidentally, his header almost hit the woodwork. I think the margin in this game is really slim and we have to show quickly that we can do better.
Do you believe that the team's downturn is only temporary?
It depends on where we go from here, and as we all know in football, if you start losing, one, two, three or four games, you always have the same challenge. Some players may start to wonder whether they should continue to play, or whether they deserve to start, etc. In the meantime, we as a team have to keep moving forward. The very positive thing for me at the moment is that the starting players can still create a lot of chances, the players coming off the bench have the right attitude, and the players being substituted continue to support the team. These are all very positive factors. Maybe this is also the norm after winning the league championship last season, but we need to continue to maintain this state.
Talk about Salah's status
I think this is normal. In the first five to six games, every question I was asked was about the new players. Now you ask me about another player and I think now is not the time to talk about individual performances. As a team, we expect much more than this. I don’t think we’re used to seeing performances like this from Liverpool, at least not here, and I’m sure it’s the same with Klopp here.
Salah missed a good opportunity today, but just like Gakpo we just talked about, he may have also got four or five opportunities. Ekitic also had several very close chances to score. Isaac had a one-on-one chance with the goalkeeper in the first half. We got 10 corner kicks and the opponent only had 4. We did not score, but they did. So this game once again proved that set-piece opportunities are very important in football matches. We created a lot of chances, we were the team that created the most chances, and I don’t think that has changed after this game, but that’s not the only way to win games, and Manchester United proved that again today, like Chelsea scoring from three set pieces and winning 3-0.
Talk about replacing Hrafenberch
He was replaced because he sprained his ankle and needs further observation tomorrow. We have another game in two days because we have three games in the next week and the players don't have much time to recover, but the good news is that we have a lot of good midfielders.