'No excuses' for Liverpool's defeat to Man Utd, says Slot

Arne Slot offered no excuses for Liverpool's defeat to Manchester United as the Premier League champions slumped to a fourth consecutive loss in all competitions on Sunday.

Slot watched on as his side fell behind with just over a minute played when Bryan Mbeumo slipped in behind Virgil van Dijk before finishing calmly past Giorgi Mamardashvili. 

The Reds continued to probe as Cody Gakpo struck the woodwork three times before finally finding a way past Senne Lammens with 12 minutes of the match left to play. 

However, Liverpool's recent set-piece fragilities returned once again as Harry Maguire's 84th-minute header sealed United's first Premier League win at Anfield since 2016. 

Indeed, the Reds have now lost four consecutive matches across all competitions for the first time since November 2014, while having lost three Premier League games in a row for the first time since February 2021 (four).

Since the beginning of May, Liverpool have conceded two or more goals in more Premier League games than any other side, doing so in eight of their 12 league matches.  

"It is always difficult to play against a team that defends in a low block and mainly plays the long ball," Slot told Sky Sports. 

"It makes it even more difficult when you go one down after one minute when one of our players is on the floor.

"If you had told me before the game that against the low block, against many long balls, we would have created as many chances as we did, I would not have expected us to lose.

"But that is what we did. We had enough chances to score more than one goal, but on the other hand, again conceded two and one of the two was the set piece.

"I think if you lose a game after you have lost four, you will have more emotion, but there are no excuses.

"We need to focus on ourselves. We had so many chances, and we should score more, we should have defended better than we did."

The defeat to United extends a frustrating trend for Slot’s side, following late league losses to Crystal Palace and Chelsea, both of which were decided by goals in the closing stages.

But Liverpool did more than enough to win the game, registering an expected goals (xG) total of 2.76 from their 19 shots compared to United's 1.26 from their 12 attempts. 

Alexander Isak and Mohamed Salah squandered glorious chances in either half, while Gakpo's individual xG total of 1.55 was higher than the Red Devils' entire total in the match. 

"Yes. Of course, we concede maybe one or two extra chances apart from the goals we conceded, but you always have to take extra risk when you are 1-0 down," Slot added.

"Taking that into account, we hardly conceded a chance, and we are waiting for us to score a goal, we have to defend the set piece.

"Like against Palace and a few other moments this season, we've conceded on a set piece and that is hard to take because it is very difficult to win a game of football if you have a negative balance on set pieces."

Liverpool's array of attacking talent have failed to fire this season, most notably Salah, who netted 29 times in the Premier League last season. 

He has now gone seven consecutive Premier League appearances without scoring a non-penalty goal for the very first time in his Liverpool career, but Slot was not concerned. 

"I think after games like this it is normal that people are focused on individual players. We talked about the signings and now we will focus on him," Slot concluded.