Arne Slot rejected suggestions of an international hangover for his players as Liverpool suffered a shock 1-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest.
Arne Slot has rejected suggestions of an international break hangover for his players after Liverpool suffered a shock 1-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest at Anfield on Saturday. Callum Hudson-Odoi’s second-half strike was enough to condemn the Reds to their first defeat of the head coach’s reign on Merseyside.
Liverpool struggled to create any real chances against a disciplined and determined Forest side as Slot kept the same line-up that had so impressively dismantled Manchester United 3-0 at Old Trafford before the international break.
Slot dismissed theories that some of his players were suffering from travelling thousands of miles across the world during the break in domestic play and believed his team’s lack of quality in possession was the main factor behind a first loss since April.
“It’s always difficult but I don’t think [the break] had anything to do with it,” Slot said. “Players came back strong and I saw today a team that wanted to fight until the end. That wasn’t to do with energy. We simply had the ball a lot we had to create from ball possession.
If you look at the goals we scored until now, we scored quite a few from transition moments from winning the ball back but the other team (Forest) played over our press a lot with a lot of long balls. We mostly got the ball in our last line.
“It wasn’t good enough today because too many individual performances in ball possession were not up to the standards that I’m used to from these players.”
We had a lot of ball possession but only managed to create three or four quite good chances. That’s by far not enough. If you have so much possession and play so much in their half we need to be much better, we lost the ball so many times in simple situations. That’s the main story from the game – ball possession was not good enough.”
