Liverpool star delivers honest verdict of ‘sloppy’ Wolves loss as Slot reveals his side’s biggest problem | OneFootball

Head coach Arne Slot and captain Virgil van Dijk have given their assessment of Liverpool’s shock 2-1 loss against Wolves on Tuesday night.

Liverpool slumped to their ninth Premier League loss of the 2025/26 campaign on Tuesday evening, losing 2-1 against bottom-placed Wolves.

Slot‘s side improved slightly after an incredibly tepid opening half, but were still really toothless in attack and could not make the most of their possession.

Mohamed Salah’s equaliser in the final ten minutes cancelled out Rodrigo Gomes’ opener, but Andre’s deflected shot deep into stoppage time sealed the victory for Wolves.

This result is a blow to Liverpool’s hopes of sealing Champions League qualification, with Slot’s team to fall to sixth if Chelsea beat Aston Villa on Wednesday.

After the loss to Wolves, Slot shed light on why he thinks this game “sums up” Liverpool’s season.

“How do I sum this up? Same old story,” Slot said.

“Recently, we are picking up points because we score many times from set-pieces, but what didn’t change in the last five, six seven games is that we struggle and find it very hard to score from open play chances that we do create.”

Slot also admitted that Liverpool’s set-pieces against Wolves “were very poorly taken”, while he also lamented the conceding of the late winner for Rob Edwards’ side.

“Not as much as I would like from all the ball possession we have, but enough and far more than the other team. But the end result is we scored one and they scored two and another one in injury time so it sums up our season again,” Slot continued.

“We have had far more possession than the other team, we have created more in open play in general than the other team, but have struggled to score from open play. Recently we have scored a lot from set-pieces. Again we had a lot of set-pieces, but in the first half were very poorly taken.

“I don’t think we played a very good first half, the second half was better, still not great, but better. We created more, and the just before injury time we were twice very close from chances to make it 2-1.

“Mo [Salah] was dribbling and had to the left and right two players open, but the ball was intercepted by their defender and there was the Virgil [van Dijk] header, and the one we conceded wasn’t even a chance.

“That has happened to us so many times this season. That it happened in injury time may be a coincidence, although it has happened so many times. We hardly gave away a chance today, we gave away one chance and conceded two.”

A mistake from Van Dijk contributed to Wolves’ first goal, though the centre-back hit out at Liverpool’s “sloppy” showing after the final whistle.

“I think it’s down to ourselves. It was slow, we were predictable, sloppy in possession and wrong decision-making,” Van Dijk told TNT Sports.

“Obviously we didn’t concede chances but if you perform like that then a result like this can be a result of that and that’s a fact. It was disappointing.”

On Liverpool’s slow start to the match, Van Dijk added: “It’s not one reason why that’s the case. The game nowadays in general, we analyse and over-analyse why things are happening on the pitch.

“We as a team want to start a game as well as we can and in the last game [the 5-2 win over West Ham] we did. Today we had majority possession but we were still making wrong decisions and we couldn’t find the end product.

“Conceding goals is always frustrating. We’ve come on the back of a couple of clean sheets, defensively we’ve been very solid, but it is what it is and we have to move quickly on because we come back here in a couple of days and we want to do well in the FA Cup. We have to show a reaction.”