Having been heralded as the ideal successor to Jurgen Klopp after gradually leading Liverpool into a new era with minimal changes last season, Slote faces a completely different challenge this season. The 47-year-old has been stumbling, to the extent that his team is threatening to make history for the wrong reasons.
Mohamed Salah has lost his scoring form, big summer signings Alexander Isak and Florian Wirtz – both costing more than £100 million – have been expensive flops and Ibrahima Konate epitomizes a defensive malaise that has led to the team conceding more league goals than it has scored.
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The defending champions’ sense of invincibility has been shattered, even at Anfield. Saturday’s 3–0 home defeat against Nottingham Forest marked the first time that Liverpool had lost consecutive league games by three goals since 1965. It was their sixth defeat in seven league games, a run of losses since September 27 that has seen them slip from top spot to 11th.
Only Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea, as champions in 2014–15, have made a worse start to their title defense with seven defeats in their first 12 matches. That disappointing performance led to Mourinho being fired in December 2015, just seven months after leading the Blues to a third title.
Blackburn Rovers (champions in 1994–95) and Leicester City (2015–16) are the only other teams to have recorded six defeats in their first 12 matches as defending champions. Blackburn steadied the ship to finish seventh in 1995–96, but Leicester – who had fired title-winning coach Claudio Ranieri in February 2017 – ended the season in 12th place to record the lowest finish for Premier League champions, two places lower than Chelsea finished the year before.
Are Liverpool heading for Leicester-style ignominy in a bottom-half finish? Or can Slott stop the decline and get his team back on track for some kind of success this season?
Everything points to Liverpool recovering from their losing streak and claiming a top four finish at some point. But if football were that simple, teams like Chelsea, Blackburn and Leicester would not have suffered such a rapid decline. There is pressure to change positions quickly in the slot.
“There’s definitely a way to go, especially with the quality players we have,” Slott said after the Forest defeat. “But I want to emphasize that I am responsible for the current defeat. You are responsible when you are winning but you are also responsible when you are losing.” “It’s not good enough and I’m responsible for it.”
Slott’s captain, Virgil van Dijk, offered a more accurate assessment of the team’s failures, suggesting that the players had to accept a share of the blame, while he questioned whether all of his teammates were doing everything possible for the team.
“As champions we cannot continue to be in the position we are in now but that is a reality,” the centre-back said. “What are we going to do about it? We’re going to try to change it and that’s the mentality everyone has to have. The main thing for me is everyone has to take responsibility. Are people doing that? I don’t know. But you have to do that.”
There are many problems to solve in slots, but the question is where to start and some of them have no obvious solutions.
With Van Dijk at the back, Konate’s form has deserted him but Slott has no choice but to sign the France international. The failure to complete a deadline-day deal for Crystal Palace defender Marc Guehi is now haunting Liverpool.
What has perhaps been overlooked is that Liverpool’s backup option Giovanni Leoni, an 18-year-old signed from Parma, suffered a cruciate ligament injury in September and will be out until next season. But Konate’s poor form has affected Van Dijk, as has the prolonged absence of goalkeeper Alisson Becker, who played his first game since a defeat against Forest on 30 September.
At left back, it took a long time for Slot to realize that Milos Kerkez was too raw and inexperienced to replace Andy Robertson. Meanwhile the impact of Trent Alexander-Arnold’s move to Real Madrid is now being felt every week, with Liverpool often having to resort to playing midfielder Dominik Szoboszlai.
With a defense that has become so inconsistent and unreliable, Liverpool’s midfielders are struggling to cope with the demands placed on them, especially when Wirtz is selected by the slot. The Germany international has failed to score or assist a single goal in 11 Premier League matches – he has two assists in four UEFA Champions League games. The 22-year-old has repeatedly failed to match the pace and physicality he faces on a weekly basis in England, and opponents have already picked up on this and are exploiting his weaknesses.
And up front, nothing is working, which is the most notable failure of the slot and its players given the depth of talent available. Isak is yet to score a league goal since arriving from Newcastle United, and his work rate is already causing obvious frustration among Liverpool supporters. Last season’s Footballer of the Year Salah, meanwhile, is performing like a player who wishes he had moved to pastures new in the summer rather than signing a new two-year contract. As for Hugo Ekitike, the apparent success story of the summer window, it is now one goal in nine matches for the France international and no Premier League goals in two months.
Salah’s impending departure for the Africa Cup of Nations with Egypt next month could crack the code for the slot, perhaps allowing him to field Isak, Wirtz and Ekitike with instructions that now is their time rather than Salah’s. But none of them are showing signs of being able to meet that challenge.
So the onus is on the slot to pull the team out of the hole and ensure that Liverpool do not end this season as the worst defending champions in Premier League history.
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