The Arne Slot trade-off that will make or break Liverpool’s season | OneFootball

Halfway into Arne Slot’s debut campaign at Liverpool, they had 46 points and a six-point lead over rivals who had played a game more. Halfway into his sophomore season, and they are in fourth place. Is that fair? “Yeah, yeah,” Slot concurred.

It is an illustration that it has not gone entirely according to plan. Given that two-thirds of their £450m outlay went on attack-minded players, it feels an indictment that only one player has more league goals than Ryan Gravenberch or, in all competitions, than Dominik Szoboszlai.

It meant that, even though the New Year’s Day 0-0 draw with Leeds was the first goalless game of Slot’s reign, it reflected wider issues. When Hugo Ekitike, the runaway leader in the scoring charts, has an off night, it is not clear who will find the net.

If Liverpool seemed to have assembled a fab four in the summer, a quartet who threatened to be unstoppable, it has not transpired that way.

Alexander Isak is injured, as he often has been. Mohamed Salah is at the African Cup of Nations, as he always would be, but only after being dropped, with his future in doubt, and when his omission from the team was accompanied by a tactical rethink. Florian Wirtz was ineffective against Leeds and is troubled by a minor hamstring injury.

Liverpool, the team that seemed built to blow opponents away, have now adopted a less ambitious design. They are Slot’s 20 per cent men. “Every single game we play, it’s hard work, it’s two teams quite close to each other,” he explained. “We are mainly the team that is probably better than the other team, but not enough. We are constantly within this 20 per cent difference.”

Their first five months of the campaign can be divided into three thirds. There was the early brinkmanship, the wins powered by late goals, but in matches that were too open. There was the awful run of six defeats in seven, a title defence in effect destroyed in November. There is the subsequent undefeated run, compiled without Salah, with a greater emphasis on solidity.

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Slot laments that Liverpool need either a moment of magic or a set-piece to break down a packed defence (Getty)

“We have had our struggles throughout,” admitted Slot. “We started really well in terms of results [but] games were really close. Then we had a phase of the season where games were still really close, but we were constantly unlucky. Now we have been seven or eight games in a row unbeaten, but if you say this, you feel like, ‘they are flying through the league’. But that is not what we are doing.”

There are regular laments from Slot: that Liverpool need either a moment of magic or a set-piece to break down a packed defence, and when they have a negative set-piece balance, that his players are punished for their honesty when they do not get penalties, and he wanted one against Leeds. “The margins are small. So that could have influenced us having three, four, five, six more points, maybe,” Slot said. But Liverpool are not blowing opponents away: they have three league draws, 11 matches decided by one goal, only one by more than two, and they lost that.

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Virgil van Dijk during the Premier League match between Liverpool and Leeds United (Getty Images)

“I will keep pushing and the players will keep pushing to get to a situation where we are more than that 20 per cent, and we can make the difference bigger and hopefully we can find a moment where we can fly through the season, but for the first 19 games, it has been a constant battle,” Slot said.

Liverpool have had to double down on their battling qualities. In their eight-match unbeaten run, they have four clean sheets and conceded only six goals; three of those came in the 3-3 draw at Elland Road when Slot feels Leeds actually created a few good opportunities.

“I think it is clear and obvious that we hardly concede chances any more,” said Slot. But there has been a trade-off. “For me, it is also clear and obvious that we find it quite hard to generate enough chances for all the ball possession we have, and that is not new for us this season.”

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Leeds’ Anton Stach (left) and Liverpool’s Florian Wirtz (right) battle for the ball (Peter Byrne/PA) (PA Wire)

Captain Virgil van Dijk underlined the more pragmatic shift. “There’s a lot more emphasis on the fact that you have to defend as a team in order to prevent chances against you,” said the defender. “And I think that’s definitely been happening. You see the hard work that obviously our midfield has put in in order to help us as the last line.”

But in a season when balance has eluded Liverpool, there can be a blandness, a lack of likely scorers. In their current unbeaten run, they are only the eighth-highest scorers. In their 100 per cent winning start, no one got more goals. But during the run of six defeats in seven, only Burnley conceded more. Defensive improvement has arrived without Salah, but as Slot knows, Liverpool are not flying. Not while they remain the 20 per centers.