Arne Slot praised Ibrahima Konate for the work he has put in since the Dutchman arrived at Liverpool over the summer.
Konate has firmly established himself as a first-team regular under Slot, having failed to do that during the three previous seasons he spent at Anfield under Jurgen Klopp.
Konate has started in each of Liverpool’s last 14 games across the Premier League and the Champions League, and he has taken his good form onto the international stage, notably captaining France for the first time during last weekend’s 3-1 win over Italy.
Slot was asked what role he had played in Konate’s improvements this season, but said that most of the credit must go to the player.
“It’s always about the player, how much effort does he put in to stay fit, and then you’ve got the performance and technical staff to do the best possible thing for him to keep him fit,” Slot said of Konate, who missed 37 games across the previous two seasons due to injury but has had a clean bill of health this term. “If the player doesn’t buy in himself, then it’s almost impossible to keep him fit. We have our ideas about how to keep a player fit and he bought into that, so up until now that has gone really well for him.
“The first game [of the season] he didn’t play vs Ipswich and there was a reason for that — he wasn’t at his best in pre-season — but to be fair to him he came back, like so many others, quite late from the Euros. We were already training for a few weeks, Jarell [Quansah] did really well in pre-season, so in my opinion it was, in my opinion, logical to play Jarell against Ipswich, but at half-time I made the decision that we needed Ibou.
“He not only bought into getting fit and doing everything for this, but every time we had a meeting with him, he was the one that I could see wanted to learn, listen and improve, and that’s what he did in my opinion. His improvement between pre-season and the Ipswich game was already a massive difference.”
