Arne Slot has downplayed concerns over Alexander Isak and Mohamed Salah, insisting the perceived dip in form stems from adaptation to a new system and disrupted minutes rather than a fundamental problem. Liverpool remain top of the Premier League, but questions over individual output dominated the manager\u2019s press conference ahead of Saturday\u2019s trip to Chelsea.<\/p>\n
Salah has three goals and three assists from nine games across all competitions, a long way short of the output he reached last season when he recorded 29 goals and 18 assists in the Premier League alone. Slot argued the decline in open-play goals began in the second half of last season and is related to how opponents set up.<\/p>\n
\u201cI see the same as the second part of last season, where he scored 12 goals, five from penalties [and] one from a set-piece, so six open-play goals,\u201d Slot reflected. \u201cHe is part of a team that faces different opposition than the first half of last season. To make that maybe a little bit more of an insight, if you compare how we won the away game against Man Utd, where they tried to play out from the back and we took the ball off them three times, to how United played at Anfield, where [Andr\u00e9] Onana only went long, then that is one of the answers why it is more difficult for us to score open-play goals.<\/p>\n
\u201cMo has a part of this, already you could see this in the second half of last season and the first part of this season. But now you are focused on Mo, the next time you are focused on Florian [Wirtz] then you are focused on Cody [Gakpo]… what I\u2019m trying to say is we don\u2019t score as many open-play goals anymore as we did in the first part of last season. This is something we work very hard on.<\/p>\n
Slot highlighted Isak\u2019s limited minutes after a truncated pre-season and time away from the squad. \u201cI said to him when he started that the difficult thing will be you will have your appearances, but if you add the minutes together, [he] probably only had two or three 90-minute games,\u201d Slot explained. \u201cThat is what we inherited from the situation of him not being with the team in Newcastle and we knew this before, so it\u2019s not an excuse.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe already scored a goal, he gets fitter and fitter, but the main thing is he adjusts to his teammates and the teammates adjust to him. The more he plays together, the better things will work. He had a great counter movement in the [Crystal] Palace game , where in the end the midfielder didn\u2019t see that and he already played the ball to the right. If he would have seen it, he would have been one-on-one to the goalkeeper. So, these are things you get if you play more together.<\/p>\n
Slot also addressed criticism of Ibrahima Konat\u00e9, noting errors have been shared across the squad and stressing a measured assessment of performance. \u201cWhat I think is if you are losing a game of football, as we did against Galatasaray and against Palace, then it doesn\u2019t help if you lose a ball a few times very easily,\u201d the Reds boss concluded. \u201cHe has been one of them, definitely not the only one because against Galatasaray I think apart from the penalty they created three or four moments and all three or four from us losing a very simple ball without any pressure, which happened to him once in the Crystal Palace game and once against Galatasaray.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you then lose a game of football, there\u2019s so much focus on that moment and then all of a sudden [the] 90 minutes have been very, very poor, which is not the way I analyse a game. Especially not afterwards where I have the time to analyse, to watch it one more time, and see what we did well and what we did wrong.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the last two games, it has been obvious and clear we\u2019ve made a few errors, not only him but also others, that we\u2019re not used to. If you do things people are not used to and you lose a game a football then normally he, other ones and the manager gets criticised.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Slot rejects alarm over Isak and Salah, blaming adaptation to a new system and match minutes. early.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3501,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,969],"tags":[195,299,1032],"class_list":["post-3502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-premier-league","tag-alexander-isak","tag-arne-slot","tag-contract-disputes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502","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=3502"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3502\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}