How Arne Slot took ‘unstoppable’ Liverpool to the next level
The Dutch coach has used a version of Pep Guardiola’s style to reduce the Man City boss to a pale imitation of Jose Mourinho
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Your support makes all the difference.By the end, all Pep Guardiola could do was hold up six fingers. He of course meant his number of Premier League titles but his team were so inferior to Liverpool that it could refer to the number of defeats they ended up with from the last seven.
It will be the image that sums up the game, and could lead many to talk of signalling his decline as a manager. That’s where we are currently.
A narrative twist is that this was after a near-perfect vision of football, that Guardiola himself might have enthused over in other circumstances. He might even have recognised it, given how similar it seemed to his first great Barcelona team. The problem for him was that it came from Liverpool.
Arne Slot has obviously overseen this transition as excellently as anyone could have imagined, but this felt a level up, an escalation even from Wednesday’s supreme win over Real Madrid.
For 35 minutes, at least, Liverpool were both irresistible and unplayable. Six fingers doesn’t even cover the number of goals they maybe should have had, given how many big chances went missing. It was a vintage 2-0 that could have been 8-0 and that really is no exaggeration.
Hence Guardiola’s response. It was all he could do, a pale imitation of Jose Mourinho in similar circumstances. If all of this is naturally going to lead to the Catalan being on the decline in the same way, the more valid discussion might be about Slot rising to the top. There are senior figures in English football outside Liverpool who describe him as “the best coach in the world”. This was why. This was a career display, what the man himself described as “close to perfection”. He might just have preferred better finishing to really show it off.
It was still the grand showcase of Slot’s football, his own personal interpretation on a philosophy that was refined for the modern era by Guardiola himself. Maybe the Liverpool coach is now bringing it beyond the master, in a way that Guardiola subjected his predecessors, too.
Except, this was that philosophy finessed to its purest, and then lit up. It is why Guardiola might recognise it with a sense of plaintiveness. It was what his Barcelona 2008-09 team used to do to teams. Liverpool utterly dominated possession in the first half, while terrorising City in their own territory. Guardiola’s team just couldn’t get out. The Catalan described them as “unstoppable”. It meant that, by the time of City’s first actual shot through Rico Lewis’s meek 35th-minute effort, the bar graph for every meaningful statistic - from shots to touches in the box - was almost totally red.
The only reservations that could be had were from the slight nerves that were allowed to manifest due to the failure to score more. Even then, Virgil van Dijk was mostly imperious. One slip, so out of keeping with his overall display, was easily covered by Caoimhin Kelleher.
Van Dijk was matched by Salah, who even had his own single slip with an inexplicable miss when through on goal. It would be wrong if it was to overshadow the pass that set up Liverpool’s first strike, though. The miss was something that can happen to anyone, even him. The pass was something so few can deliver, especially as divinely as this. After a spell when Liverpool’s pressing had the feeling of a team almost pushing the ball over the line through its force, Salah offered the necessary delicacy of imagination. He curved a beautiful ball across the face of the goal for a chance that Cody Gakpo just couldn’t miss. That was illustrated by how the Dutch forward didn’t even get a clean touch but the ball still went in. It wasn’t the only time.
Gakpo should have scored minutes later, and Van Dijk could have had a hat-trick of headers from corners.
Stefan Ortega was solid in the City goal but it summed up their display that he also had a slip that gifted Liverpool a goal, through the foul on Luis Diaz for the penalty.
Salah put it away, to also put himself centre of attention again in another way. After the game, he made what now feel customary comments about his future, saying this would be his last game against City for Liverpool.
He must have forgotten there’s a return. It did mean the comments couldn’t quite dampen celebrations for Liverpool in the way they did on Monday morning, because it now feels part of a routine. It’s clear he wants to stay… a line that offers a segue into Guardiola, and even the chants about him being sacked in the morning.
He has never wanted to leave City like this, but the big question now is how he solves it. The champions suddenly look engulfed by a number of different issues, as illustrated in some of the selection decisions. Both Lewis and Matheus Nunes were compromise options, because City needed control, even though they were roles that required energy.
It was another oddity of this game for Guardiola. This could have been the worst possible defeat, and City were dominated in a way we’ve never seen before… and yet there was still that sense that they stemmed the tide a bit. They didn’t concede as many as they might have.
Guardiola spoke of using it as “a reset”.
“I want the team back, I want my players back... we will make a reset from here. From here, we will start to build something.
“Call me delusional but from here we will start to build games.”
Does he know how? He hasn’t ever experienced this, after all. It was put to Slot afterwards whether he feels sympathy for Guardiola in that sense. He said he didn’t, but only because the Catalan has won so much, and has repeatedly proven City can keep going.
Liverpool, most pointedly, have proven beyond all doubt they can go to another level. They may be the champions. This may be the future.
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