Slot sack unavoidable as six damaging quotes on tactics, ‘attacking football’, Salah and Barnsley resurface

Arne Slot should be sacked for bottling it against PSG, trying an ‘almost impossible’ tactical change and turning Liverpool into Barnsley.

Liverpool were hammered by PSG in the first leg of their Champions League quarter-final in France, following the 4-0 thrashing Manchester City inflicted by losing 2-0 in France.

Jamie Carragher said it “should have been five or six” and “was like watching a team from a lower division,” with “the gulf in class very worrying from a Liverpool point of view”.

“The manager has tried something but he’s got it massively wrong tactically, how he went about it,” Carragher continued. “They were actually more open with the back five than they would be with the back four. I have never seen [Virgil van Dijk] so uncomfortable in a Liverpool shirt in my life. I think he will be pleading with Arne Slot to never play that system ever again because he found it so tough.”

It was a dreadful Liverpool performance and the manager admitted “we are lucky with only losing 2-0”.

But somehow more incriminating than that concession are some of Slot’s own words from earlier this season, which make their PSG surrender even worse and ultimately a sackable offence.

Before a 0-0 draw with Arsenal in January , Slot indulged in his favourite pastime: bringing up Paris Saint-Germain and what he once called “the best game of football I was ever involved in”, completely unprompted:

“My football is Paris Saint-Germain vs. Liverpool, Liverpool vs. Paris Saint-Germain. “That is how I would love to have every single game, but you need to have two teams to have an open game of football and not all these things [long balls and low blocks] that don’t make a game of football nice. “Against Fulham, I don’t think many people thought it was a joy to watch. I have said many times I found our games against Paris Saint-Germain a joy to watch. “So compare these games with each other and ask yourself why one is a joy to watch and the other is harder to watch.”

Facing his specific ideal opponent for the “open game of football” Slot craves and has been denied in the more conservative, rudimentary Premier League, he bottled it and sacrificed his tactical ideals for Liverpool to be outshot 18 to three with 26% of the ball.

Around the same time, Slot bristled at the suggestion Liverpool had become dull or boring to watch:

“I find it really hard to hear, but it isn’t that I completely disagree with them. I would use different words and I would take certain things into account. “I want to win as many trophies as I can, but I think I’m also known for the fact that my teams always try to play attacking football.”

Khvicha Kvaratskhelia alone had more than twice as many shots as Liverpool – seven to three – at the Parc des Princes; Desire Doue (four) had more, and both Ousmane Dembele and Achraf Hakimi had as many.

Liverpool had a quarter of the ball, failed to have a shot on target in a Champions League game for the first time since November 2020, and failed to have a shot of any kind in the first half of a game in any competition for the first time since April 2021.

Slot described Liverpool as being “in survival mode for large parts of the game”, with the tie not quite over because PSG “kept us alive by not scoring a few open chances”.

It doesn’t sound like Liverpool tried to “play attacking football”. Although many supporters did find it offensive.

By Slot’s own admission, he tried something “almost impossible” against PSG:

“Is the question: ‘Should I change dramatically?’ I don’t know what is in your head but if, for example, you want another system with five defenders that could be an issue,” he said in November.

“The system we are playing now suits the players best. They have played this system probably throughout their whole career, and there is hardly any training time for us. “So it is almost impossible to change our complete idea about football if we play every two days.”

Slot tied himself in knots after the defeat trying to justify the change in approach, pointing out that “every tactic has been tried over here but the result is always the same: Paris Saint-Germain blowing the opponent away”.

PSG scraped a draw with 10-man Monaco in the knockout phase play-offs and lost 3-1 at home to the same side in Ligue Un last month. Bayern Munich beat them at the Parc des Princes in November, Newcastle earned an away draw against almost exactly the same starting XI in January , Liam Rosenior nearly beat them with Strasbourg in a 3-3 draw in October, and even Spurs scored three times against them and led twice in a November defeat.

As part of one of his many defensive diatribes this season, Slot also said:

“But if I am known for one thing then it is attacking football, playing a lot of attackers and bringing a lot of attackers in when we are a goal down. “So I find it hard to hear that we play boring football let alone that I am not playing attackers.”

Having made an ineffective quadruple substitution at 2-0 down in the 78th minute at PSG, Slot’s final change was to bring on Trey Nyoni for Jeremie Frimpong in stoppage time and thus keep Mo Salah on the bench .

His explanation was that “in the last part of the game, it was more about surviving for us than there was ever a chance that we could score,” and that “this was a 20, 25 minutes where we were only defending and Mo has so much quality, but for Mo to be 20, 25 minutes defending inside his own box, I think it’s better for him to save his energy for a lot of games that are coming up in the upcoming weeks”.

Slot betrayed his own self-prescribed trademark.

Back in early March, Slot spoke candidly about his personal sadness at seeing set pieces and long throws become so prevalent in the Premier League .

“First of all, you have to accept it,” he said. “I think it’s mainly here in the Premier League. If I watch other leagues I don’t think there’s so much emphasis on set pieces.

“If I watch an Eredivisie game, I see goals being disallowed and fouls on goalkeepers being given and I’m like: ‘Wow, that’s a big difference’. Here, you can almost hit a goalkeeper in his face and the referee still says: ‘Just go on’. “Do I like it? My football heart doesn’t like it. If you ask me, thinking about football I think about the Barcelona team from 10-15 years ago. Every Sunday evening you were hoping they would play. “Now, most of the games I see in the Premier League are not for me a joy to watch but it’s always interesting because it’s so competitive and that is what makes this league great because there is so much competitiveness. “Everyone can win against everyone. But just as someone who loves to watch football without being interested in winning or losing, just to be enjoyed, I think there’s a big difference between now and three or four years ago in the Premier League. Not only because of the set pieces but because teams have become so much stronger.”

Slot himself said Joe Gomez played to “add some set-piece quality”. And as Andy Hunter of The Guardian wrote , the defender ‘taking an age over his long throw-ins also managed to disrupt the hosts’ dangerous rhythm, much to Luis Enrique’s annoyance’.

Perhaps the biggest self-own and most damning Slot quote of all came earlier this year, containing as it did another theme of his season: a wonderfully hypocritical frustration at opponents changing their tactics against Liverpool.

“I did not change our style, but teams have changed their style against us,” he insisted a few months ago, with one particularly unfortunate take coming after the FA Cup win over Barnsley :

“How many games did we play this season? Probably around 30? I think 28 of my pre-match meetings I could just throw in the bin. I think only once or twice the (other) team did what they did the 20 weeks before. Arsenal was one of them – they just played against us what we’re used to. “So many times this season, when a team plays us, they do something different than they do in their other games. “(In Europe) the teams we face are mainly the same as in their other games, whereas in the Premier League… they completely change their style. “But Barnsley always play a 4-3-3 and today decided to go with five, which I completely understand, which I would have done if I was their manager as well. But another time, a meeting that you try to show the players what they can expect, what they usually do…”

“It’s the first time they play with five at the back,” said an unperturbed Luis Enrique. “But we are used to seeing other teams change formation to play against us, it’s normal.”

Like Carragher said, “it was like watching a team from a lower division”. And Slot now knows you either die a title-winning hero, or you live long enough to accidentally turn Liverpool into a mid-table League One club.