Florian Wirtz has publicly pushed back against Virgil van Dijk\u2019s assertion that Liverpool \u201cgave up\u201d during their 4\u20130 loss to Manchester City, while manager Arne Slot delivered a far sterner appraisal of how the goals were conceded.<\/p>\n
Asked about Van Dijk\u2019s comments before Wednesday\u2019s meeting with Paris Saint-Germain, Wirtz said: \u201cI didn\u2019t know about this, that he said this,\u201d and added: \u201cBut I think I would not agree directly because we still tried to create chances to turn the game around.\u201d He acknowledged the psychological strain of a heavy deficit: \u201cOf course, when the game gets longer, and it is in the 80th minute, and you are 3\u20130 down, it is mentally difficult to go and go and go.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wirtz defended his team\u2019s effort through the closing stages. \u201cWe just tried to give our best in the game\u2014also when it was 3\u20130 or 4\u20130. I think we also had a few chances then. This is not our standards that we lose 4\u20130 to City. We wanted to go through the round. Next year, we should go better and be better on the pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result was particularly galling for supporters and the manager because of the manner in which the defeat unfolded. After an opening first-half blitz from Erling Haaland, the Liverpool defence began making a string of sloppy errors and the side failed to recover.<\/p>\n
Slot, speaking to TNT Sports, made clear this was not an isolated worry: \u201cIt\u2019s not the first time this season that we\u2019ve conceded goals that were a concern to me.\u201d He continued: \u201cNow there were four in one game, four chances conceded, four goals conceded. That\u2019s not the first time this season. I think many times this season we\u2019ve only conceded one or two chances and those were goals.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the pattern of mistakes, Slot said: \u201cSo the manner we conceded them, I think I could separate them \u2018two and two\u2019 where every goal you concede something goes wrong, and you would like to improve something, but two out of the four were goals I hated more to concede than the other two.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wirtz disputes Van Dijk’s ‘gave up’ line, after their 4\u20130 defeat; Slot singled out defensive errors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11135,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,1056,1031],"tags":[1505,299,1047],"class_list":["post-11136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-man-city","category-paris-saint-germain","tag-accountability","tag-arne-slot","tag-champions-league"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}