Liverpool boss Arne Slot bemoaned another setback as bottom club Wolves pulled off the shock of the season so far with a stoppage-time winner – 24 hours after the Reds boss had claimed Premier League games are no longer a joy to watch.
Andre’s deflected strike capped a frantic end to the game after Mohamed Salah had cancelled out Rodrigo Gomes’s 78th-minute opener.
Slot, referring to many sides’ reliance on set–pieces, said on Monday that ‘most of the games I see are not a joy to watch’ but also admitted, prophetically as it turned out: ‘It’s always interesting as it’s so competitive, and that makes this league great.’
After last night’s defeat – their ninth of the season – Slot said: ‘It’s another setback and we didn’t help ourselves with this result, not at all. But there are still nine games to play. We are coming closer and closer to the end.
‘My expectations haven’t changed throughout the season because I expected more than we are fighting for now. Dropping points in a game where it’s absolutely not necessary.
‘If you look at the run of play, I’m not saying we played great, but if we play this game in this fashion 10 times we don’t lose 10 times.
Liverpool boss Arne Slot bemoaned ‘another setback’ after his side lost to bottom club Wolves
Virgil van Dijk also hit out at his side’s ‘slow’ and ‘predictable’ play at Molineux on Tuesday
‘It’s far from sure that we win every time, therefore we are not good enough. That has happened to us so many times.’
Former captain Steven Gerrard was scathing, with Liverpool now clinging on to a top-five spot. ‘For 65 minutes, Liverpool were desperate tonight, really poor,’ he said on punditry duties for TNT Sports.
‘They didn’t play with the right tempo, the right quality. Wolves were very comfortable.’
And captain Virgil van Dijk told TNT Sports: ‘I think it’s down to ourselves. It was slow, we were predictable, sloppy in possession and wrong decision-making. 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.’
When asked why his side started the game slowly, he reasoned: ‘It’s not one reason why that’s the case. The game nowadays we 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 we did, today we had majority possession but we were still making wrong decisions and we couldn’t find the end product’
Liverpool return to Molineux on Friday, when they play in the fifth round of the FA Cup, and Van Dijk added: ‘Conceding goals is always frustrating. We’ve come here on the back of a couple 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.’
