Arne Slot previews Sunday’s visit from Manchester City as the Liverpool boss prepared to go up against Pep Guardiola for the first time in his career
Arne Slot was watching live coverage of the Champions League from his Merseyside apartment on Tuesday night when the Liverpool boss was moved to turn up the volume on his remote control. Slot’s family may be over, visiting from their homeland, but the head coach still ensured he took control of the evening’s viewing when his former side Feyenoord visited Sunday’s opponents Manchester City.
But it wasn’t seeing his old club fight back from three goals down to earn an unlikely draw inside the final 15 minutes that piqued Slot’s attention most. Instead, it was a moment of tribute from the supporters in the away end that left him in no doubt as to the esteem he is still held by those in Rotterdam.
There was more of a Dutch dialect detected than usual in the ‘Arne Slot‘ song that reverberated around the Etihad, but it was a special touch from the Feyenoord followers in Manchester on the night. It was a message too, that the man himself more than took notice of.
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“What made this game special for me was more sitting at home, putting the volume up and hearing the Feyenoord fans singing my name,” Slot said. “That’s the biggest compliment you can get if you leave a club, that the fans still like you.
“Of course in Holland and for me, as a Feyenoord fan, I could hardly believe what I saw. At 3-1 you thought, ‘Ookay…’ but then City took control again. Then (clicks fingers) it was 3-2 and then 3-3! You don’t see this very often, the first time in the history of the Champions League this has happened (in a game with just 15 minutes left).
“I spoke to more than a few people to congratulate them but it was not in a tactical manner. Not asking what they did, I can analyse that game myself.
“Take nothing away at all from the result but it was a dominant performance from City – any other day they would have won that game. I spoke with a lot of them but only ones I worked with, not [my replacement] Brian Priske or his coaches.”
But if Feyenoord’s late rally flabbergasted an increasingly embattled Pep Guardiola, it only served to further expose the flaws that have been obvious for a number of weeks where the current Premier League champions are concerned.
City arrive at Anfield on Sunday on the back of a six-game winless run with Tuesday’s 3-3 draw with the Eredivisie side ending a sequence of five successive defeats. It’s statistically the worst period of Guardiola’s career and the most barren spell for City since Stuart Pearce’s time in charge; a period which pre-dates the Abu Dhabi revolution at the club in 2008, when their modern story as a financial giant of the game really began.
It doesn’t take a tactician as astute as Slot to see where the problems lie for Guardiola’s team just now and victory for an in-form Reds – who top both the Premier League and Champions League – will see them go a whopping 11 points clear of their visitors this weekend.
Slot, as you would expect, stopped short of making any bombastic predictions for Sunday’s game, or what the ramifications of victory would mean in the wider scheme of the season, but even he is surely having difficulty processing just how advantageous his position might look next week, if it goes according to plan.
As a manager who has spent the best part of 15 years dominating the landscape of La Liga, the Bundesliga and the Premier League with Barcelona, Bayern Munich and City – where he will have spent over a decade before he departs – it’s impossible to overstate Guardiola’s influence on modern coaches.
Slot was still player, being sent out on loan to PEC Zwolle, when Guardiola was winning the treble as Barcelona coach in 2009 and the Reds’ boss has never denied that the current City coach and his ideas have been studied and analysed en route to the Anfield hotseat.
Slot, however, does not subscribe to the idea that a meeting with Guardiola represents the ultimate task for a football coach, with the Dutchman preferring to heave the lion’s share of the importance on the players of both teams.
“This will be the first time we face each other,” Slot says of his impending head-to-head with Guardiola. “With Feyenoord we never got to the latter stages of the Champions League.
“[Pep’s Barcelona] had nothing to do with me wanting to become a manager but when I played I always felt that certain balls my team-mates gave were successful, and certain balls were unsuccessful.
“Then, when I started to watch Barcelona, I saw that the successful balls were only the ones that Barcelona played, so that gave me the reassurance that what I thought was the right ball proved to be the right ball.
“It definitely helped me to create my own idea about football and my own playing style. There was a bit from playing myself, such as feeling that if a full-back kept the ball on one side we were going to lose this ball, and if they played it inside then everything would open up. And if you watched Barcelona you always saw the same pattern.
“It is not about ‘admiration’ but there are few people in football who, when you watch, they never let you down. That has been Lionel Messi, who is always a joy to watch. Nine times out of 10 the games of Barcelona, Bayern Munich or City have been a joy to watch for everyone who loves football. So that’s why I like to watch his teams play.
“He was the one who invented – maybe not invented, maybe it was done 100 years ago – but came up with the idea of inverted full backs and then thought: ‘Right, now I’m going to push my centre back (John Stones) into midfield’. You always see new things or inventions with him. They have a very good and clear playing style. Always an interesting game plan as well.
“It is always about the players. It is not about me against him. It is always the players who make the difference. The only thing is if you play against him, and it’s the same with some other managers in this league as well, you think: ‘OK, he could come up with this, but he might come up with this, or this.’ Because he has so many different game-plans.
“The playing style is almost always the same, they want to have ball possession, but they can adjust certain positions. Analysing them takes even more time than some other teams who always have the same structure.
“But that’s what I thought about Real Madrid and then they came up with Brahim Diaz playing as a false nine which they have never done before. And Bayer Leverkusen were the same. It takes a lot of time to analyse City, that’s for sure.”
Just as well then for Slot that his Tuesday night was spent doing just that, even if he wasn’t expecting to hear his name being sung from the Etihad while City were being analysed.
The real hope is that he hears it once more against Guardiola’s side this week, this time with a decidedly Scouse twang.
