Arne Slot had an extensive to-do list on Tuesday. It included overseeing Liverpool’s final full training session before beating Real Madrid for the first time in 15 years, conducting the pre-match press conference, several interviews and getting the shopping on the way home. His wife and two children were arriving from the Netherlands that day for a short visit. Best make the place look presentable and the fridge full. Jobs done, it was time to watch his previous club torment Sunday’s opponents.
“What made this game special for me was sitting at home, putting the volume up and hearing the Feyenoord fans singing my name,” said Slot of his former team’s remarkable Champions League comeback against Manchester City. “That’s the biggest compliment you can get if you leave a club: that the fans still like you.”
Slot is being modest. Feyenoord fans revere the coach who resurrected their club’s fortunes and brought the Eredivisie title and KNVB Cup back to Rotterdam. Without taking anything away from those achievements or their relationship, there was another reason why Feyenoord fans sang Slot’s name at the Etihad Stadium on Tuesday. He is worrying City.
The 46-year-old has never met Pep Guardiola nor faced the reigning Premier League champions in his managerial career. “With Feyenoord we never got to the latter stages of the Champions League,” he joked. Yet his almost flawless start with Liverpool has compounded Guardiola’s and City’s problems amid the uncharted territory of five defeats in six winless games. Slot has seamlessly shifted any anxieties Liverpool might have harboured over the post-Jürgen Klopp era on to their Premier League rivals.
Liverpool’s head coach stated at the start of the season that his immediate target was to reduce the gap to City and Arsenal. Liverpool will go 11 points clear of the former should the 20th game of Slot’s reign yield an 18th victory. Anfield’s targets have changed. City’s may have to in the event of another loss on Sunday. Not that Slot will buy into the idea that the threat from the Premier League champions of the past four years is diminishing.
“For me as a Feyenoord fan, I could hardly believe what I saw,” he said of Tuesday’s TV viewing. “At 3-1 you thought: ‘OK …’ But then City took control again. Then it was 3-2, but City took control again, and then 3-3. And City took control again. You don’t see this very often. It was the first time in the history of the Champions League this has happened [a team blowing a 3-0 lead after 75 minutes]. I spoke to more than a few people afterwards to congratulate them. Not Brian Priske [Slot’s successor] or his coaches, only the ones I worked with. I didn’t ask what they did; I can analyse the game myself. Take nothing away at all from the result but it was a dominant performance from City – any other day they would have won that game.”
Liverpool were dominant and victorious the following night against Real Madrid, leaving Carlo Ancelotti to praise the “really good dynamic” of opponents in “great form, connected, and playing with a high intensity”. A fifth successive win in the Champions League also brought a 10th clean sheet of the season.
Slot’s team have kept an unmatched six clean sheets in 12 Premier League matches and conceded only 12 goals in 19 games compared with 18 at the same stage of last season. The central defensive partnership of Ibrahima Konaté and Virgil van Dijk has been integral to the improvement, so too the protection offered by Slot’s well-balanced side, and the loss of the former to a knee injury sustained on Wednesday is a severe setback. City have kept two clean sheets in the Premier League, their lowest tally since Guardiola’s first season in charge.
Slot has no interest in replacing Klopp as the great rival to City’s most successful manager. “It is not about me against him. It is always the players who make the difference.” But Slot was drawn to Guardiola’s playing style during his formative years as a coach, and influenced by it.
“It is not about admiration but there are a few people in football who, when you watch, they never let you down,” he says. “That has been Lionel Messi, who is always a joy to watch, and nine times out of 10 the games of Barcelona, Bayern Munich or City have been a joy to watch for everyone who loves football. That’s why I like to watch his teams play.
“It had nothing to do with me wanting to become a manager but when I played I always felt that certain balls my teammates gave were successful, and certain balls were unsuccessful. Then, when I started to watch Barcelona, I saw that the successful balls were only the ones that Barcelona played, and that gave me the reassurance that what I thought was the right ball proved to be the right ball. It definitely helped me to create my own idea about football and my own playing style.” Guardiola could suffer the consequences on Sunday.
