Since Liverpool’s shaky showing in the Community Shield, head coach Arne Slot has fielded a number of questions about his club’s readiness for the season. Ahead of Friday’s season opener against Bournemouth, Slot was asked how ready he felt the squad was for the start of the season:
“As ready as we can be. I think I’ve emphasised last week the fact that we have lost three or four starters and, unfortunately, Ryan Gravenberch was not able to play last week and is not able to play this week. So that means if you exclude the goalkeeper from the 10 outfield positions, five were different than the main starters we had last season.
“If you then look at the quality we bring on the ball, I’m very happy with that. Without the ball, it’s eight out of 10 times also very good – but the aim at this club is not eight out of 10 times, it’s 10 out of 10 times. And that is the fine-tuning we still need to find defensively.
“That went in pre-season one time better than the other one. Against [Athletic Club] Bilbao I was really, really pleased with our defensive performance because we didn’t give away any chance I think at all from open play. But we did concede [from] two set-pieces. Against [Crystal] Palace the main chances we conceded were when we lost the balls ourselves.
“So it has been ups and downs where the downs were not so low, but I think there is the main part for us still to improve. Which is normal. I think for everyone in pre-season it’s normal that there’s still room for improvement, let alone if we not only lost three or four starters, I think we’ve lost five to six players that played quite a lot of minutes for us last season and we brought in four new ones, so then it’s normal that there’s a little bit of adaptation. But we are definitely ready for the league to start.”
Slot is, of course, correct that pre-season is meant to work out the kinks and bed in new players while the team returns to fitness, though I don’t think he’s meant to refer to the Community Shield as “pre-season” as much as we all see it as such. Friday’s performance will tell us if the positives outweigh the development that still needs to occur.
Speaking of the season in general, Slot also emphasized how challenging it is to enter a league campaign as champions:
“The reason why that is so difficult [to retain the title] lies mainly in the fact that there’s so many competitors that can also win the league over here. To win it once is already very special, let alone if you can win it twice in three, four or five years, or as we did, twice in five years and [Manchester] City did even better than us in the last few years. So that’s unbelievable if you’re able to do this in this league. And probably this year is going to be harder than every year before, because every team brings in new players but our main competitors definitely did as well.”
The Reds have a challenging first test against Bournemouth on Friday, and hopefully the Champions will give us a performance that both delights and silences our nerves.