Liverpool began the new campaign with a Community Shield loss at Wembley, beaten on penalties by Crystal Palace after a match that exposed defensive inconsistencies but offered attacking promise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Reds twice took the lead only to be pegged back on each occasion. Hugo Ekitike opened early on his competitive debut before Jean Philippe-Mateta’s penalty cancelled that opener. Jeremie Frimpong restored Liverpool’s lead and Ismaila Sarr then sent the match to a shootout. The side have not kept a clean sheet in any of their four matches since a 4-2 defeat by AC Milan last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were clear positives going forward. Ekitike scored on his competitive debut and fellow summer signing Florian Wirtz also impressed, giving Slot increased belief in the team\u2019s attacking progress. Slot reflected on pre-season improvements in possession and chance creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The whole pre-season we’ve seen we are able to create more and we are more comfortable on the ball,” Slot said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We create more opportunities, chances, we dominate maybe even more. Last season we had a lot of ball possession but that didn’t always lead to promising situations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Now we are better at creating and getting in promising situations than we were in my opinion throughout all of last season.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With the Premier League opener at home to Bournemouth five days away, Slot conceded defensive adjustments may be required to halt the steady concession of goals across pre-season and the Community Shield.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The other side is also true,” Slot said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n“We’ve conceded four against Milan, one against the Japanese team, two against Bilbao and two again here today.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
“What made us really strong last season was we mostly won by one goal. That had mostly to do with us keeping a clean sheet or at a maximum conceding one goal.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He added: “It needs maybe a little bit of an adjustment defensively at the moment because we don’t concede a lot of chances but we do concede goals at the moment.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Slot warns defence must improve after Community Shield shootout defeat; attack shows clear signs now<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175],"tags":[299,206,231],"class_list":["post-1491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","tag-arne-slot","tag-florian-wirtz","tag-hugo-ekitike"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491","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=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1497,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions\/1497"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}