Liverpool manager Arne Slot has played down concerns about Alexander Isak and Mohamed Salah’s form this season, insisting both players are simply getting used to operating in a new system.
The Reds’ new £125 million ($168.1 million) striker has netted just once in his first five appearances for Liverpool, who have now lost back-to-back matches and haven’t lost a three in a row since early 2023.
Salah, meanwhile, has three goals and three assists to his name from nine games across all competitions but is widely accepted to be playing well below the standard he set last year, when he racked up 29 goals and 18 assists in the Premier League alone.
The duo are by no means alone in their struggles, with Liverpool as a unit falling short of expectations despite sitting top of the Premier League, and questions about individual form dominated Slot’s press conference ahead of Saturday’s trip to Chelsea.
Isak ‘Still Adjusting’ to New Surroundings
Slot was keen to point out that Isak’s appearance statistics are misleading at this point in the campaign. Given his truncated pre-season, the Sweden international has only started three games and has not yet completed a full 90 minutes.
“I said to him when he started that the difficult thing will be you will have your appearances, but if you add the minutes together, [he] probably only had two or three 90-minute games,” Slot explained. “That is what we inherited from the situation of him not being with the team in Newcastle and we knew this before, so it’s not an excuse.
“He already scored a goal, he gets fitter and fitter, but the main thing is he adjusts to his teammates and the teammates adjust to him. The more he plays together, the better things will work. He had a great counter movement in the [Crystal] Palace game, where in the end the midfielder didn’t see that and he already played the ball to the right. If he would have seen it, he would have been one-on-one to the goalkeeper. So, these are things you get if you play more together.
“Playing more together has been a bit harder than last season because of Alexander Isak, because of [Alexis] Mac Allister, because of Conor Bradley, that Dominik Szoboszlai has played on eight, on 10, on right full back for the reasons I just said. But we are, in my opinion, too focused on this season, but the last part of last season had a lot of similarities with the start of this season—with one exception that [in] the second part of last season we scored seven set-pieces, which led to a lot of wins, and this season we’ve conceded four, I think.”
‘Teams Defending Against Salah Differently’
As for Salah, Slot argued his dip in productivity actually began last season, when teams were forced to alter their approach to games after being torn apart by the Egyptian during the first half of the campaign.
“I see the same as the second part of last season, where he scored 12 goals, five from penalties [and] one from a set-piece, so six open-play goals,” Slot reflected.
“He is part of a team that faces different opposition than the first half of last season. To make that maybe a little bit more of an insight, if you compare how we won the away game against Man Utd, where they tried to play out from the back and we took the ball off them three times, to how United played at Anfield, where [André] Onana only went long, then that is one of the answers why it is more difficult for us to score open-play goals.
“Mo has a part of this, already you could see this in the second half of last season and the first part of this season. But now you are focused on Mo, the next time you are focused on Florian [Wirtz] then you are focused on Cody [Gakpo]... what I’m trying to say is we don’t score as many open-play goals anymore as we did in the first part of last season. This is something we work very hard on.
“The more we will play together in the new setup, the better that will go, but we still struggled a bit to find enough goals from open play in the second part of last and the first part of this season.”
‘Ibrahima Konaté Attracting Unfair Criticism’
One of the biggest targets of Liverpool fans’ frustrations this season has been centre back Ibrahima Konaté, who is among those players to have disappointed. What sets the Frenchman apart from the rest is the fact he is in the final year of his contract and has, up to this point, dismissed Liverpool’s offers of an extension.
Slot was keen to remind supporters Konaté, a target for Real Madrid, is not the only player to have made mistakes so far this season.
“What I think is if you are losing a game of football, as we did against Galatasaray and against Palace, then it doesn’t help if you lose a ball a few times very easily,” the Reds boss concluded. “He has been one of them, definitely not the only one because against Galatasaray I think apart from the penalty they created three or four moments and all three or four from us losing a very simple ball without any pressure, which happened to him once in the Crystal Palace game and once against Galatasaray.
“If you then lose a game of football, there’s so much focus on that moment and then all of a sudden [the] 90 minutes have been very, very poor, which is not the way I analyse a game. Especially not afterwards where I have the time to analyse, to watch it one more time, and see what we did well and what we did wrong.
“In the last two games, it has been obvious and clear we’ve made a few errors, not only him but also others, that we’re not used to. If you do things people are not used to and you lose a game a football then normally he, other ones and the manager gets criticised.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Arne Slot Offers Explanation for Alexander Isak, Mohamed Salah Form Struggles.
