Arne Slot reveals secret to Liverpool's watertight defence ahead of Arsenal clash | OneFootball

Liverpool manager Arne Slot says his side's exceptional defensive performances have stemmed from their ability to dominate most matches they have played in.

The Dutchman has enjoyed a record-breaking start to life at Anfield, winning 11 of his first 12 games across all competitions, and he became the first manager in club history to win his first six away games on the road after the Reds beat RB Leizpig 1-0 in the Champions League midweek.

A surprise 1-0 defeat to Nottingham Forest in September is the only blot on Slot's copybook so far, but Callum Hudson-Odoi's winner is just one of three goals Liverpool have conceded so far in the Premier League - comfortably the best defensive record in the division.

That resolve will be put to the test on Sunday when Liverpool visit Premier League title rivals Arsenal, but Slot is confident that he knows why his team have been so successful so far.

"There are two reasons why we don't concede a lot," Slot told reporters at his pre-match press conference. "One of them is that most games – almost all of them, maybe except for one – we dominated and controlled for large parts of the game.

"It helps if you dominate, if you have the ball, in order that you then can't concede. But I also like that if we have difficult parts of the game or for a large part of the game like we had against Chelsea, that the work-rate is incredible not to concede.

Slot has celebrated the success of Van Dijk / Alexander Hassenstein/GettyImages

"If you combine that with having the likes of Virgil [van Dijk] and Ibou [Konate] and the two goalkeepers we've used until now, that is probably one of the reasons – these three elements – why we haven't conceded that much."

Slot also explained the impact of having three successive away games on the calendar - the visit to Arsenal sandwiched either side of trips to RB Leipzig and Brighton & Hove Albion.

"That's part of our lives [and] that's also what the players are used to," he continued. "If they play Champions League or, like last season, Europa League, you know these challenges are there.

"For this game [Arsenal], we have three days in between, so that's more than we had before the Leipzig game. It's also more than we have for the Brighton game. Unfortunately for us, for all these three games we have one day less in recovery than the three teams we face, but that is also part of a season and part of our lives."

Arsenal suffered their first Premier League defeat of the season last time out - a 2-0 loss to Bournemouth that saw William Saliba sent off - whereas Slot's Liverpool overcame Chelsea in a hard-fought 2-1 win at Anfield.