Arne Slot’s no-frills Liverpool beat RB Leipzig in display to make Jurgen Klopp shudder
Arne Slot’s Liverpool produced a Professional Away Performance to maintain their 100 per cent Champions League record. We miss Jurgen Klopp.
We suspect Red Bull’s new Head of Global Soccer was watching this game and shaking his head, questioning what Arne Slot has done to His Liverpool. Having struggled to assert their dominance against Chelsea, not for the want of trying, Liverpool were back at it against RB Leipzig before their no-frills approach nearly came back to bite them.
We miss the frills.
As is the case with this all-new Champions League format it often doesn’t feel as though there’s any great jeopardy watching Liverpool under Slot. That’s obviously to his great credit. They go a goal up and that’s pretty much that. If they score another that’s great – and they have in all but two of their 11 wins this season – and if the opposition draw level they’ll push on again, but they won’t take risks with a view to killing the game.
Conceding just five goals in 12 games is testament to that strategy and we’re at risk of rosy retrospection when comparing boring old Arne Slot to Jurgen Klopp, who also took a pragmatic approach at times. It wasn’t all heavy metal.
But it was hard to watch this game without thinking that by the time RB Leipzig finally started to exert some pressure on the Liverpool goal after 70 minutes, when Caoimhin Kelleher was forced into two saves in quick succession, first from Benjamin Sesko after Ibrahima Konate gave the ball away, and then from a deflected Xavi Simons shot, Klopp’s Liverpool would already have been out of sight.
It’s risk and reward of course, and in a bid to go two, three or four up, Leipzig may have been allowed back into the game, but Klopp was of the view that attack was the best form of defence, and sitting back in the second half here very nearly cost Slot and his side.
Kelleher produced another excellent save at full stretch to deny Benjamin Henrichs before Lois Openda tapped in from an offside position. Slot was angsty on the touchline as Leipzig’s disappointing forwards finally woke up, though not quite enough to deliver the telling final blow.
It will go down as A Professional Away Performance, code for a bit boring, and while there were undoubtedly those sorts of displays under Klopp they were a rarity, with Liverpool’s default setting under Slot’s predecessor to keep pushing forward in search of more goals, with entertainment the enjoyable by-product.
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Darwin Nunez remains an engrossing presence, stealing a goal from Mohamed Salah to give Liverpool the lead here and generally Making Things Happen. It’s perhaps telling that Klopp’s pet project has been used sparingly by Liverpool’s more circumspect manager, with the chaos Nunez brings the antithesis of the Dutchman’s orderly approach to football.
It’s a bloody effective approach though, and while this will be read as criticism by many, and we suppose it is in a way, there’s more than one way to skin a cat; who’s to say a blowtorch is better than a scalpel?
This is the first time in the club’s history that Liverpool have won 11 of their opening 12 games of a season and all of their opening six away games. It’s been a brilliant start by a talented manager who clearly knows what he’s doing.
And the fact that we’re comparing his style of football to Klopp’s should bring smiles to Liverpool faces as their results have left us no other recourse in our bid to find fault in an excellent, well-coached football team.
