Liverpool manager Arne Slot said the team has ‘moved on’ from the shocking drama with club legend Mohamed Salah’s explosive outburst accusing the club of ‘throwing him under the bus’ with three consecutive
snubs from the starting 11. Slot is also confident that the team is finally showing the signs of a squad that had one of the most expensive summer shopping windows and has so far languished in mid-table.
Liverpool lost nine in 12 matches before Slot steadied the ship with a five-game unbeaten run, during which Salah did not start a single game. It included a 3-3 draw at Leeds United, which was the precursor to Salah’s media comments. The club was in crisis mode for a while, prompting a serious chat between Slot and Salah before the recent match against Brighton, where the latter came on as a substitute and assisted Liverpool’s second goal in a 2-0 win.
“Actions speak louder than words. We moved on,” Slot told reporters on Friday.
The Reds now go away to Tottenham on Saturday, the first match of a run without Salah, who is representing Egypt at the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON), that might stretch upto a month.
“Now he’s at the AFCON playing big games for himself and the country. All the focus for him is over there and there should not be any distraction of me saying anything because we moved on after the Leeds interview and he played against Brighton,” Slot said.
The English champions overhauled their squad in the summer, spending close to £450 million to sign Alexander Isak, Florian Wirtz, Hugo Ekitike, Jeremie Frimpong, and Milos Kerkez. However, apart from the impressive Ekitike, the new arrivals have struggled, with Slot admitting he underestimated how long the revamped team would take to find consistency.
“I think we are getting closer and closer to the team I want us to be and that has gone with ups and downs,” said the Dutchman. “But for me that makes complete sense because all the changes we’ve made during the summer and we made them on purpose because we thought we needed to. If I’m completely honest, maybe I didn’t expect it to take maybe as long as it did, but, looking back on it, reflecting on it now, I think I’ve been too positive because if you go with a new group where not all of them are completely ready to play every single game, 90 minutes in this intensity, you have to adapt. Sometimes he can play, then he cannot play. So it takes maybe a bit of time, and we’ve been very unlucky.”
