Liverpool head coach Arne Slot has acknowledged that he might have made an error by selecting Dominik Szoboszlai for the starting line-up in the Reds’ dramatic turnaround victory against Southampton.
The win propelled the Premier League frontrunners an impressive 16 points clear at the summit despite being behind at halftime. A swift goal from Darwin Nunez after the interval and a brace of penalties by Mohamed Salah secured the Anfield outfit all three points.
Slot’s decisive action at the break, making a triple substitution, was instrumental in the comeback. Dissatisfied with the team’s first-half performance, he introduced Harvey Elliott, Alexis Mac Allister, and Andy Robertson to replace Szoboszlai, Curtis Jones, and Kostas Tsimikas.
Post-match, Slot admitted that the changes were necessary to change the course of the game and suggested that starting Szoboszlai might have been a misstep. “Today, if I could do it one more time over, I would have started it differently than I started today,” he said.
“But you don’t know this in advance. Every time I am sitting here and talking about Dominik, I’m talking about he is a machine. He can keep on going, running and running and running.
“It was maybe the first time this season I saw a different energy from him, which is maybe normal. Maybe I made a mistake by playing him because he gives so much every single game.
“The good news is he only played 45 and is more rested for the upcoming week now than he is if I played him for 90. And the good thing for me is I have more than only one good midfielder in terms of Dominik.
“We have quite a few and Harvey came in really strong and helped the team again after him helping the team against Paris Saint-Germain also.”
(Image: Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images))
Liverpool needed a rocket at halftime with Slot far from mincing his words in the dressing room. “I didn’t give them compliments at halftime, I can tell you,” he explained. “Maybe it was because I was sitting up there instead of being at the line.
“When you watch a game from there, you always feel that, ‘Ah, maybe even I can play in this game’. But when you are on the line, there is always more tempo.
“I don’t think I was wrong if I said at halftime that the energy levels were far, far, far too low. That is what had to change and that is why we made three substitutions.
“Apart from bringing in quality, also to create something. Because nine out of 10 times, when you take three out, the other eight are like, woah, something else should happen. That was the only thing I could come up with at halftime to create something different for the second half.”
Liverpool.com says: Things didn’t go well in the first half, but that can all be forgotten now. The Reds were always likely to come back and score at least twice at some point. In the end, they did that within 10 minutes of the second half kicking off.
