Hoo boy. If ever there was a week when Arne Slot needed a win, it was this one. Not because of Liverpool’s patchy form leading up to it. Not because the schedule had served up a home game against Burnley, which was eight points deep in the relegation zone.
No, it was external events that put the pressure on the Liverpool coach. This was the week that Real Madrid jettisoned Xabi Alonso as their manager (unfairly, some would say). The Spanish World Cup winner is beloved among Liverpool fans for his time on Merseyside, so Slot needed three points from Saturday’s match to quiet the naysayers thirsting for the suddenly available Alonso.
The Dutchman didn’t get them. Liverpool controlled large stretches of the game, but Burnley managed a second-half goal through Marcus Edwards to escape Anfield with a 1-1 draw.
Arne Slot commits Liverpool malpractice at the worst time (for him)
Now, we can argue that Alexis Mac Allister should have started the match in midfield. We can bemoan Dominik Szoboszlai’s first-half penalty that crashed against the crossbar. We can speculate that the presence of Alexander Isak (hurt) or Mohamed Salah (playing at the African Cup of Nations) might have turned the match in the Reds’ favor. More than any of those things, we could just congratulate the Clarets for a well-executed smash-and-grab job.
None of this mitigates the damage to Slot, though. A team of Liverpool’s expensively assembled talent shouldn’t have needed anything of the aforementioned to defeat Burnley. What’s most concerning here is the lack of any discernible deficiency that’s leading to all these dropped points. One week, they’re undone by defensive errors, and then the next, they suffer from an offense without a cutting edge.
Yes, sometimes they’re just unlucky, like the draw against Leeds two weeks ago, when Harrison Reed pulled a last-second equalizer out of his posterior regions.
Slot’s second season is starting to look like Claudio Ranieri’s second in charge of Leicester. In 2015, the Italian coach’s laissez-faire management style made him perfect to take over from the unhinged Nigel Pearson, and it propelled his team to a title.
The players still played with Pearson’s discipline but with enormously better morale. However, come 2016, Ranieri’s approach and the loss of key players to richer rivals caused Leicester to come unstuck from their winning ways.
“Knowing the club” is an overrated trait for a coach, but hiring a beloved ex-player to manage the team will buy some goodwill from the fans and the press. Not only that, Alonso’s unbeaten season as the manager of Bayer Leverkusen shows that the Spanish World Cup winner is more than just a handsome face.
Unless Slot can reel off a series of wins in the Premier League and the Champions League, he may find himself discarded the same way Ranieri was in 2017, a coach who was the right man at the right time but failed to evolve with time.