Arne Slot on Conor Bradley’s injury, Gabriel Martinelli, and his ‘surprise’ at good performance claims after draw with Arsenal | OneFootball

Arne Slot says Conor Bradley is set to undergo scans after being stretchered off during Liverpool’s goalless draw with Arsenal.

Bradley was withdrawn late on after an awkward landing and while Slot stressed that he will need to wait to see what the scans show, he is fearing it might be as bad as it looks.

“It doesn’t look great if he has the injury we fear he might have,” he said.

“I don’t know yet, but it doesn’t look great if you have to go off on a stretcher.

“I think when we see the video, we both think probably the same, but we have to wait on the scans if it’s that bad, or maybe he can play on Monday. Let’s hope so.”

Arsenal forward Gabriel Martinelli was criticised for trying to push Bradley off the pitch while he was down injured but Slot sympathised with the Brazilian.

“The problem for him is, and that’s the problem in general in football, is that there is so much time wasting and players pretending that they are injured in the final parts of the game or during the game, that you can sometimes be annoyed if you want to score a goal when you think that player is time wasting,” Slot explained.

“I’m 100% sure that if he knew what the injury might be, that he would never do that.”

When it was to put to Slot that it was a good performance from his side, the Liverpool boss disagreed, though says his players still deserve credit.

“I’m a bit surprised that people think this is a good performance because when we have 60% or 70% ball possession against other teams, people find it boring and now it’s a good performance,” he said.

“But again, we hardly created a chance. And now we say, what a performance.

“This is who we are. We know how to dominate possession, we know how to do build up, but we struggle, obviously, in a few things. Set pieces is one of them, dominating moments in the final third to find the right pass and the right execution, that is something that’s still not at the level some other teams are and that’s why we’re working every single day.

“But, yes we did really well on ball possession, but it wasn’t that much different than playing Leeds at home or Fulham away where we dominated possession as well, but people are annoyed because of the fact that these teams are not of the magnitude of Arsenal. Then it’s not good enough, which I completely agree on by the way because I want to see us creating more chances as well.

“I think we showed today, and not for the first time this season, that in the big games we are able to compete with any other team. I think we’ve had a result against every big team we’ve played except for Man City where it was so obvious we scored to make it 1-1, but the only ones who didn’t think so were the referees and VAR.

“In all the other games I think we’ve showed we can compete against any team.

“The question then is why are we 14 points behind them and for me that’s also so obvious because we struggle so much against low blocks, to unlock that, and as you all know sitting here, there is 20 goals difference between them and us on set pieces.”