‘Big setback’: Arne Slot says Liverpool fell below standards in Forest defeat

Arne Slot described Liverpool’s first defeat of his tenure as a “big setback” after being shocked at home by Nottingham Forest.

Callum Hudson-Odoi came off the bench to secure Forest’s first win at Anfield since 1969 and maintain their unbeaten start to the Premier League season. Liverpool had almost 70% of possession throughout the match but were unable to beat Matz Sels.

“It is a big setback,” Slot said. “If you lose a home game that’s always a setback and especially if you face a team, we never know, maybe they will go all the way to fight for Champions League places, but normally this team is not ending up in the top 10. If you lose a game against them that’s a big disappointment, although they were organised and structured really well.”

Liverpool had scored seven goals and not conceded in their opening three matches under Slot but were found wanting. “Ball possession was not good enough,” Slot said. “We had a lot of ball possession, but only managed to create three, four, five quite good chances – that’s by far not enough. It wasn’t good enough today because too many individual performances in ball possession were not up to the standards that I’m used to from these players.”

There is not much time for Liverpool to recover from the loss, as they begin their Champions League campaign in Milan on Tuesday. “I want to see the same attitude every single day after a big win, after a small win, after a draw, after a loss,” Slot said. “We go out to work again tomorrow, analyse what we did well and what we didn’t do well.

“There were enough things we could improve from in the United game, that’s also what we showed them, we showed them also a few good things and that’s going to be the same tomorrow and the day after. But this is a different game than the one we’ve played till now because we faced a low block, so the team we faced played really low and that’s because of the result that we had a lot of ball possession, but we were not able to create a lot.”

Nuno Espírito Santo brought on Hudson-Odoi and Anthony Elanga, who changed the dynamic of the team and the direction of the match. “[I am] very happy as many of our fans today in the stadium were not even born [when Forest last won at Anfield] so that says how hard it is,” Nuno said. “Very happy and proud of the work of the players, they worked very hard. Overall, we knew how hard the game was going to be. It is all about taking your chances in the right moments. We knew we had to make subs, and they impacted the game.”