Arne Slot has revealed what he told his Liverpool troops at half-time to ensure they shared the spoils against Arsenal.
The Reds battled from behind on two occasions to earn a 2-2 draw at the Emirates Stadium. Liverpool were well below their best in the first half, with Bukayo Saka opening the scoring for the Gunners inside nine minutes. And while Virgil van Dijk levelled for the visitors nine minutes later, Mikel Merino deservedly put Arsenal back in front before the interval.
But Liverpool made improvements in the second period and they managed to restore parity in the 81st minute when Mo Salah calmly slotted home his 163rd Premier League goal – moving him joint-eighth on the all-time scorer list.
Asked by LiverpoolWorld what his message to his squad at the interval was, Anfield boss Slot replied: “The thing is if you face Arsenal with a manager that is working here for four or five years and he has done an incredible job here because his team can play in so many different set-ups. They always play 4-3-3, but the way they position themselves they can do – I think he said it once himself – 40 different set-ups. I don’t know what he exactly said, but it is many different set-ups. So, you prepare a game plan, you expect something but you cannot tell your players 40 different options, so you try to prepare them in the best possible way.
“Now they play with a false nine, which they do maybe more often, but they didn’t come that many times with a full-back inside. We could prepare them at half-time a bit better from what we saw in the first half; we took some more risk, but I think the main thing was we just put more energy into it. We pressed them more aggressive from the start and I saw that we also keep going where they had to take a few of their quality players off as well because they couldn’t go on and maybe that helped us in the end a bit as well.”
Salah’s equaliser was assisted by Darwin Nunez, who again started up front with Diogo Jota again injured. Nunez struggled in the first half and he didn’t have a shot all game. But Slot was delighted with the Uruguay international’s impact as he got in behind Arsenal’s defence to assist Salah’s leveller – and was somewhat surprised Nunez managed to see out 90 minutes given his lack of game-time this term.
Slot added: “The last thing is also the reason I [kept] him on, because if you just keep on going and I see you’re fit enough to keep competing. Also, after speaking about Ibou [Konate] that is almost what also surprised me [because] Darwin hasn’t played that much yet. To then play three games in a row with the difficult fixtures we had, an away game in Europe and then to be so fit in the end of the game… I took Curtis [Jones] out against Leipzig because that was what I was a bit afraid of: is he ready to play two in a row?
“But with Darwin, in my opinion, I have no choice because he is the only available striker at the moment. To see how hard he worked was really pleasing. Yes, he had to play deep in the first half but that had not so much to do with the game plan, but with the quality of Arsenal in the first half because they dominated us, without creating that many chances. They also needed set-pieces for the second goal and to threaten us, whereas the first goal was, of course, great individual quality of Saka.”
