In the 10th round of the Premier League in the early hours of Sunday morning, Liverpool will face Villa at Anfield. At the press conference before this game, Red Army coach Slaughter talked about the team's preparations and also answered some que...
About the team's injury situation
Hrafenbecher participated in yesterday's training, but Isaac and Curtis Jones were not able to do it yet. I've mentioned many times that in the final stages of recovery from injury, progress may be slower or faster, so we'll see. Hrafenberch trained yesterday and will train with us today. We will decide whether he can start based on the situation. As for the other two players, 99.9% of them will not be included in the game roster.
About team depth
I am satisfied with the team, our strength and our strategy and policies. But the problem is that not all players have made adequate pre-season preparations or some players have suffered injuries. When 3/4 of the players are injured, we can only rely on the remaining 15 or 16 players. I believe 20 players is enough, but it will be difficult for us to keep them healthy for obvious reasons.
Isak only joined us on September 1st, which makes it even more difficult to keep players healthy. If some players are unavailable, we have to rely on the same players. Maybe we had good luck last season and not so much this season? But we do have a couple of away games with only a few days off between games. That's not an excuse, just fact. We have to deal with this situation because we have three games in seven or eight days. So it's not about depth, it's about injuries and player availability.
About my contract
I didn’t expect to ask this question at all! My focus is to get Liverpool back on winning ways. Discussions about contracts, even if they existed we wouldn't talk about them here. So let's start winning games again, that's my main goal.
Regarding how to deal with the wave of injuries
we will deal with it based on the actual situation. In Isaac's case, preseason games actually take place during the season. Someone asked why he was playing? Otherwise I would have to play Ekitic every game. Hargreaves told me that our two forwards each played 34 games last season and we are going to play 60-plus games here, so I need Isaac to play as many games as possible. This situation also applies to several other players, such as Frimpong and Bradley. If one of them is out, the other one has to play more games, so Szoboszlai is used more at right back. That's true for every team, so it's not an excuse but it's definitely different than last season. They all had at least one year of Premier League experience last season and stayed healthy. Now some players have to play more than expected, but that's just the reality. We have enough players to cope with the game, but I have to take care of a few of them, which is why I decided not to play seven or eight of them.
What I'm Learning
Rather than looking back, my main focus is on how to change and evaluate decisions later on, my focus is on how to perform well on Saturday. The learning part can be left for later, the current focus is on the future and how to achieve good results and performances against Villa.
Key factors regarding change of form
I think the first half against Crystal Palace was similar to the 60 minutes against Brentford. The quality of the players gives me confidence that the chances we create will eventually translate into more goals. Of course, there are some other areas that need improvement. If I talk about what we need to improve on, people say I'm making excuses! There were a lot of positives from last weekend and the number of chances we created was still enough to support a tournament where we wanted to show competitiveness.
About the team's lack of confrontation
In every Premier League game, confrontation becomes more and more important. Giving up a point against Manchester United from a set piece and then giving it up again from a throw-in was not good for us. We defended 16 set pieces, 15 of which were very good, but the current situation is that 15 is not enough. After conceding the first goal, I was told: "No plan survives first contact" and that's what makes the game difficult. Being down by a goal after five minutes is never a good thing for confidence. If there's one thing I liked about Brentford, it's that we still created chances after conceding, we just couldn't score and the game became their style in the last 10 minutes.
On the team needing more clean sheets
I've won games in the past, such as away at Manchester City, where I strayed from my beliefs, so I'm more than willing to make adjustments based on the circumstances. I don't think our problem is constantly giving opportunities to our opponents, that's absolutely not the case. Apart from the Crystal Palace game, we deserved more in every other game. Even in this week's game, we only gave our opponents three clear chances, but these three times were converted into goals. But those were good chances and I didn't see us giving our opponents too many chances in the game, so I don't think we need to completely change our style, but we do need to do better.
About the performance of the Valar
This shows that the Valar's ways are more effective than our ways. If you don't win at the beginning of the season, people say it's not the same team; but once you start winning, things become positive and for us it was the opposite. Most teams have similar points, except Arsenal. This shows that competition in the Premier League is very fierce. You could see the signs of Villa, their style of play was very good and Villa didn't make a habit of losing.
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