Liverpool will enhance subsequent season in seek for perfection, warns Arne Slot

Arne Slot has warned Liverpool’s Premier League opponents that he expects the champions-elect to enhance subsequent season as they try to fulfil his imaginative and prescient of the easiest group.

Liverpool require one level at house to Tottenham on Sunday to protected a record-equalling 20th league identify and for Slot to transform the primary Dutch trainer to win the Premier League. The head trainer admits his group have “a big responsibility” to ship at Anfield given the membership’s ultimate Premier League triumph, in 2020, got here in the back of closed doorways right through the Covid pandemic. Slot’s circle of relatives shall be in attendance, even if he says their consult with was once deliberate months in the past to coincide with a public vacation within the Netherlands.

Liverpool have ruled the Premier League season, by no means relinquishing first position after returning to the highest on 2 November and embarking on a 26-game unbeaten run that rendered a identify race out of date. Yet Slot insists they have got resembled his superb group best once in a while, and that they will have to and can enhance subsequent season.

“Every manager around the world wants to achieve perfection and that will probably never work out,” Slot mentioned. “But even in the last few weeks we are still trying to get better in certain things and keeping the standards as high as we had them for the whole season. Maybe in some parts of the season or in phases of some games we were quite close [to his vision of what a Slot team should be] but in other moments we have to do much better. We can definitely improve.

“In general every manager that works at a top club wants to have control of a game, every single minute of the game, but that is hardly possible in this league. There were phases also during the season or during games where we didn’t have that control, so I think we have to become even better … The positive thing from us this season is that we never went down a lot, even if we didn’t have the control I would like. We were still difficult to score against but a bit more ball possession and threatening the opponent even more would be good.”

Slot, grounded as ever, insists he has no longer pondered what it could imply to win the identify in his first season at Liverpool, his position in Anfield folklore or what the celebrations may well be like on Sunday. Asked whether or not he was once conscious that he was once an inch from turning into a Liverpool legend, the 46-year-old answered: “Yes, but I prefer to get my mind on that inch and not on what happens afterwards because there is still an inch to be done.”

He mentioned: “We have to do the job. But of course it gives us a lot of confidence the way we have played all the way through the season in sometimes difficult circumstances as well. We’ve always shown up, not only us but the fans as well. I have all the confidence we will show up again, but I also know how unpredictable a game of football can be. That’s why we have to be so well prepared.”

Slot is conscious about what it is going to imply to the supporters to win the league, even if alternatives to have interaction are uncommon. “Sometimes when I’m driving on the motorway they come up right next to you for 500m or a kilometre and [punches the air],” he mentioned.

“There aren’t many interactions to be made because I go from the training ground to my house, I open the gate and drive into my house. Yesterday when I wanted to have lunch I thought: ‘Shit, I don’t have anything in my fridge.’ So I went to the supermarket. I was in and out but there was someone who wanted to take photos of me. I don’t go outside that much, so there aren’t many options to talk to me.”