Arne Slot has said Liverpool will not get carried away with being tagged title favourites given the fine margins in the Premier League and Manchester City’s track record of reeling in rivals.
Liverpool opened up a five-point lead over City before the international break, and have made their best start to a Premier League season since winning the title in 2019-20. Opta now gives Liverpool a 60.3 per cent chance of winning this season’s championship but Slot, whose side visit bottom side Southampton on Sunday, insists recent history shows the reigning champions can never be written off. Arsenal held an eight-point lead over City on April 1st, 2023. Liverpool were three points clear of City in April of this year. Pep Guardiola’s team won the title on both occasions.
“I don’t talk about favourites,” Slot said. “It is boring but I just talk about the next game which is a challenge in itself. In the Premier League the margins are very small. That is true all season. I have followed the league and there was a moment when City were eight points behind Arsenal, so there is no use in getting carried away at all at this moment in time.
“These teams like City, Arsenal and Chelsea, even [Manchester] United and all the others, are able to put together a run of games like we did. So we are not getting carried away at all and looking at it in terms of favourites.
“The players know what they have to do to win a game, and it’s a lot. If they could give 50 per cent less and still win, maybe we would think we have 50 per cent extra in the tank and not need to give our maximum for results. But we know it has been a close call in many games.”
Slot concedes that Liverpool’s remarkable start – nine wins in 11 league games, 15 wins in 17 matches in all competitions – has helped eradicate any concerns the players might have had over him replacing Jürgen Klopp in the summer.
“It is completely normal they thought that. They didn’t just have nine years with the former manager, they had nine successful years,” he said. “Then you always wonder, ‘are things going to change?’
“In the summer we didn’t bring in that many new players so then it is quite normal, if you look at the teams we are in competition with who did bring in players, to think, ‘what is going to happen this season?’ Especially because nearly all of them were on holiday two weeks before the season started.
“That is why it was really helpful we got results from the start and they saw from the start the playing style didn’t change that much. So that combination of things helped.”
Liverpool will be without Trent Alexander-Arnold, Alisson, Diogo Jota and Federico Chiesa at St Mary’s. Of the injured quartet, only Alexander-Arnold has not been ruled out of next week’s Champions League game against Real Madrid. – Guardian
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