Liverpool great Steve Nicol gave a damning review of Arne Slot and Liverpool despite victory against Chelsea on Sunday.
The Reds climbed back to the Premier League summit with a 2-1 win against Chelsea at Anfield but the manner of victory hasn’t sat well with the four-time Division One and European Cup winner. Nicol, who 458 times for the club between 1981 and 1994, pulled no punches on his thoughts on Slot’s tactical setup and mindset for the game.
Nicol was a pundit on ESPN where he discussed Liverpool’s win but gave a scathing view of the performance and manner of the result. Despite having more shots on target than the visitors, Chelsea had more shots in total, significantly more possession, and almost 150 more passes than Liverpool, as well as five corners to one.
The Reds icon admitted that it was the biggest test for Slot in the job but his mood drastically changed dissecting the performance. “They’ve passed the test in terms of the result of the game but I’m not so sure they’ve passed the test in terms of the performance,” Nicol said.
“If I’m a Chelsea player, I’m going home thinking ‘how did we not get something out of that game’. I think the highlights kind of summed it up, Liverpool going forward looked way more dangerous than Chelsea did and I think that’s the difference in the result here that Liverpool did get the two goals, and going forward looked as though they were going to create.
"I don’t remember (Caoimhin) Kelleher making a proper save and the fact that Chelsea had more passes, more possession, more shots, tells you that this wasn’t as impressive as I had hoped for. In fact, I wasn’t impressed. I don’t enjoy Liverpool playing at Anfield against anybody and sitting back and try to play counter-attacking football because that’s what it was.
“Maybe we just have to get used to looking at a different type of Liverpool because under Klopp, particularly at home. This is our place, we’re squeezing the life out of anybody who wants to come to our field and try to play. This absolutely was the opposite. The result’s perfect, you can’t complain about three points but I’m sorry, the performance for me wasn’t particularly great,” he said.
Nicol continued to give a warning ahead of Liverpool’s trip to Arsenal, putting more question marks over Slot’s decision not to start Alexis Mac Allister and his willingness to go toe-to-toe with the Gunners. “I think there’s no doubt they missed a 100 per cent fit Mac Allister,” he continued. “I’m assuming he didn’t play because of the mileage he’s been traveling with the international games because they miss him.
“When you decide to get a line in the sand and basically say ‘you can get this far in there’ and you’re not getting any further, you have to close the ball, and they didn’t do that for the majority of the game.
“And had Mac Allister been in there beside (Ryan) Gravenberch, I think that would’ve happened. The worrying thing for me is, this is probably the biggest game of the season for Liverpool at Anfield and the way he (Slot) went about it was to sit, that worries me because I’ll be shocked if they don’t do the same at Arsenal.
“You’re not telling me they’re going to go away from home in an even bigger game and decide to get after and close the ball down early. That’s not happening. He (Slot) has to thank his lucky stars that they won this game but he has to look at it and figure out if you’re going to go to Arsenal and sit, there has to be a confrontation with the man on the ball at a certain point.
“You can’t just stand back and let Arsenal do what Chelsea did today because the back four was overworked, but it did its job and that’s why Kelleher didn’t have much to do. You take the points but you have to get Mac Allister in there with Gravenberch and then you can decide whether it’s Curtis Jones or (Dominik) Szoboszlai because Szoboszlai recently hasn’t been at it,” Nicol concluded.
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