Arne Slot has vowed to “fight on” at Liverpool and insisted support from the club’s hierarchy has not wavered following the alarming Anfield defeats by Nottingham Forest and PSV Eindhoven.
The Liverpool head coach met the club’s sporting director, Richard Hughes, on Thursday to dissect the Champions League defeat by PSV that extended his team’s dire run to nine losses in 12 games. It is Liverpool’s worst sequence of results since an identical run in 1953-54 and has heightened the pressure on Slot before Sunday’s Premier League trip to West Ham.
Slot admitted after Wednesday’s home reverse that he would have to see how his employers assessed the situation in their next conversation. At a press conference to preview the West Ham game on Thursday, scheduled before the PSV defeat, he claimed their stance remained unchanged. “We’ve had the same conversations as we’ve had since I’m here,” he said. “Not sure if I said it last night, but we fight on. We try to improve, that’s what we all try, but the conversations have been the same as they’ve been for the past one and a half years.”
Slot conceded that the pressure is rising amid Liverpool’s worst run for 71 years, yet denied being let down by his players or that morale has deserted them.
“I didn’t see morale being low at the start of the game or at 1-0 yesterday but after the third, fourth or fifth knock I saw a very difficult five to 10 minutes,” he said.
“We were able to generate enough chances at 2-1, after more knocks, to make it 2-2 but at 3-1 I could see it hurt the players and it wasn’t a period where our fighting spirit was at its best, and that’s putting it mildly.”
Despite that admission, and some poor body language at the end of both defeats, the head coach believes the Premier League champions have not lost their fighting spirit and remain committed.
Slot, who expects to have Alisson back from illness on Sunday and could have Hugo Ekitiké and Florian Wirtz available, said: “In the first 85 minutes, or for large parts of the [PSV] game, I saw a team that have had a lot of setbacks recently and were still able to fight against that.
“Not always with the end product you would like because fighting is of course part of what you should do but if fight was enough to win a game of football then it would be quite easy. You need a little bit of something extra as well, you need quality playing one-v-ones, getting crosses in the box and arriving with the right timing.
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“But I see a team that never gives up. I see the running stats, I see it in the chances we create after we go down, but I agree the last five or 10 minutes against Forest and the last five or 10 minutes of yesterday’s game were not the same as the other minutes we played.
“For me that is not that this team lacks fighting spirit, no. Maybe in the last few minutes but not in the rest of the game.”