Arne Slot the authority on ‘joyous’ football? You’ve having a laugh, mate | OneFootball

A response to the set piece-ification of the Premier League not from Arrigo Sacchi, Marcelo Bielsa or an AI interpretation of the views of the late great Johan Cruyff but the absurdly hypocritical thoughts of Arne actual Slot in the midst of the most dull and turgid season of football from Liverpool football club since Roy Hodgson’s inauspicious few months at Anfield 15 years ago.

Allow us to first extend our gratitude to Slot for hitting out at what we completely agree is the scourge of football. Bring back the days when set pieces were a means to complain about how professional footballers can’t beat the first man and more often than not a cause for concern for the attacking team owing to the risk of being hit by some Proper Football on the counter-attack.

We don’t want to see games decided by one repeatable, unpressurised skill that Reece James and Declan Rice have mastered while their bemuscled teammates need only be slathered in baby oil in the box for the spectacle to become rather more late-night Channel 5 than Sky Sports at tea time.

It’s not the only reason the majority wish ill of Arsenal in the title race – we must also consider their fans and manager – but it will be an asterisk used to demean their achievement. Set piece goals being worth half that of one scored in open play would be a far better idea than Arsene Wenger’s daylight offside madness.

However, to hear Slot talk of the “joy” being sucked from football one would think he was one the great footballing philosophers, a bastion of Total Football, a tiki-taka exponent, rather than someone renowned for taking his foot off the gas when a couple of goals to the good in Liverpool’s title-winning season, who essentially gave up on attacking in his bid to stop the rot in his second campaign.

“I just wouldn’t be surprised if you went to watch a Sunday League match now and the 16-year-olds were completely focused on set-pieces,” he added like an Italian nonna bristling at the use of shop bought pasta as she rolls her dough by hand in a family-run Milanese restaurant. She might do a better job of integrating an outstandingly creative £100m playmaker into the Liverpool team.

And we wonder whether Slot would have been quite so emboldened to be the authority of all things right in football on the back of his side’s horribly boring and fortunate victory over Nottingham Forest, the impossible-to-watch 0-0 draw with Arsenal or any of the other life-sucking games of football Liverpool have played this season rather than after a 5-2 win over West Ham.