When Liverpool started the season by winning nine of their first 10 games, the general response was “they haven’t played anyone yet”, Now theyhave won nine of the next 10 games – beating Chelsea, Leverkusen, Real Madrid and now Manchester City along the way. They are nine points clear of Arsenal and Chelsea, odds-on favourites to win the Premier League, and enjoying their best 21-match run of results since 1989. It’s time to acknowledge that Arne Slot has presided over something rather remarkable.
Sunday’s win against City, like the win last Wednesday against Madrid, was a little different in style from Liverpool’s big wins under Jürgen Klopp (they never actually did beat Madrid under Klopp, though admittedly he was usually up against stronger Madrid sides than the one that lost at Anfield last week). The striking thing about Wednesday night, though, was that Liverpool beat Madrid in a way that is unfamiliar for any English side. They didn’t overrun Madrid with tempo and aggression, they didn’t hammer them at set pieces: they outplayed them, controlling the game and picking them off.
The City team that turned up at Anfield on Sunday had lost five of its last six: an unprecedented slump in the 16 years since they were taken over by Abu Dhabi. You could say it was a good moment to face them. Yet Liverpool now had to justify the pressure of being favourites, while City would surely fight desperately for a result that would end their appalling run.
[ It’s beginning to look a Slot like Liverpool got the right manOpens in new window ]
In the event, Liverpool smashed City from the first whistle and Cody Gakpo scored what proved to be the winner after just 12 minutes. In that period, the football was reminiscent of their best wins against City under Klopp. In the middle third of the game, City managed to establish a foothold and begin putting their passes together, but Liverpool showed composure and patience in defence to keep them at a safe distance, while continuing intermittently to shred them on the counter-attack. Caoimhin Kelleher had to save from Kevin de Bruyne after Virgil van Dijk played him in with a late mistake, but apart from that, City never created a chance. Liverpool never managed to shut them down like this throughout the entire Klopp era.
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It had seemed so likely that the departure of Klopp would create a personality vacuum at Liverpool, a feeling that the immediate future could not be as good as the recent past, eventually leading to sense of depression and drift. We had the foreboding examples of what happened when managers like Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger left the clubs where they had worked for more than 20 years.
Instead, Slot has got the team interested in what happens next in an unexpected way: by showing them how they can get even better. They’re not dwelling on yesterday because they feel excited about tomorrow. It feels like the team right now is in a sweet spot where the best qualities of the Klopp side, built for charging energy and directness, are developing new dimensions under the more patient and cerebral influence of Slot. The cross-fertilisation has produced something very dynamic, though as Pep Guardiola keeps saying, this too shall pass…
Liverpool had big performances from each of the three Klopp-era stars whose contracts expire at the end of the season. Van Dijk, his late mistake aside, showed again that he remains the best defender in the Premier League. Trent Alexander-Arnold reminded everyone of his special qualities with some raking long passes, while Mohamed Salah assisted Gakpo’s goal with one of the passes of the season so far, and scored a penalty in the second half to make up for a horror one-on-one miss.
In his man-of-the-match interview afterwards, he suggested this might be the last time he played for Liverpool against City at Anfield – the latest in a series of remarks apparently designed to pressurise the club into offering him a new contract.
Jamie Carragher recently suggested that it was “selfish” of Salah to negotiate publicly in this way, but this behaviour is actually encouraging for those Liverpool fans who would like him to stay, because it shows he wants to stay too. If Salah had already decided to leave then he would not be drawing attention to a situation that no longer had anything to do with Liverpool (notice there hasn’t been a peep out of Alexander-Arnold).
That means that Liverpool still hold plenty of cards in the negotiation. If the contract Salah is demanding is a financial risk for them, then it is also a financial risk for other big clubs, who can’t be sure that he will perform to the same level transplanted to their environment (Liverpool at least have the assurance that he has functioned brilliantly in their system for nearly a decade).
[ Manchester City approach the surreal as they head for LiverpoolOpens in new window ]
So it’s hard to see another club at Liverpool’s level rushing to outbid them. There may well be clubs in Saudi Arabia who will pay more, but Salah won’t win the Champions League playing there. And he can surely still play for big money in Saudi Arabia after he is too old to be decisive at the top European level. A compromise deal to stay therefore seems the most likely outcome.
Still, signing new contracts doesn’t always bring happiness. Pep Guardiola signed one less than two weeks ago, though even on the day of its announcement he seemed quite gloomy about it. He explained that he had thought this would be his last season at City and then his side had lost four games in a row: now he felt like he couldn’t leave with the team in this state. It is hard to imagine that either this message or the tone in which it was delivered electrified the City dressing room.
At Anfield, he responded to Liverpool fans’ taunts that he would be “sacked in the morning” by holding up six fingers, in reference to the number of Premier League titles he has won. In so doing he did not really remind people of the glory of his and City’s past triumphs. He reminded them of José Mourinho, who pulled a similar stunt (in his case with three fingers) not long before he was sacked at Manchester United. Mourinho at least revelled in the role of heel, with Guardiola this is uncomfortable to watch.
Talking about your historic titles might make an under-pressure manager feel better in the moment, but nobody should confuse it with actual leadership. As Arne Slot has shown us, nobody talks about the past when things are going well.
