Arne Slot, Liverpool's manager, spoke candidly after his team lost to Bournemouth in the latest English Premier League match.
Arne Slot, manager of the "Reds" Liverpool, acknowledged that his players were visibly tired before ultimately fading to a 2-3 loss at Bournemouth during injury time in the English Premier League last night. He did not blame his players at all. However, he felt that the second-half stoppage time was too short.
Slot said, "It's the cruelty of the game. If you lose during stoppage time after coming back from 0-2 down, that's tough. I think there were only 5-10 minutes in the first half when we couldn't fully control the game. After that, we played well but conceded two goals and were down to ten men (the second goal came when Joe Gomez was injured and substituted). So, that didn't help at all."
"I feel that if we had equalized after trailing 1-2, we could have gotten back into the game. We had many chances, but we were still behind 0-2. Yet, I believed the team could come back."
"In the final 10 minutes, the game was open, and both teams had chances. But I saw our players were tired because we only had two days' rest between matches. Most were the same players having to play again. So, I won't blame them, especially when playing against Bournemouth, a team that plays very aggressively."
"We were tired at the end. They had better chances than us in the last ten minutes, and then scored from a long throw-in."
"For me, four minutes of stoppage time wasn’t enough. But in the end, it didn’t matter because they scored. Even if we had two or three more minutes, this game should have had more than four minutes added. There was a free kick that took 2-3 minutes, VAR incidents, substitutions. That’s what I told them — four minutes was insufficient."