Arne Slot’s 46th birthday will see the Dutchman take to San Siro, as Liverpool prepare to contest their first match in the newly revamped league phase of the 2024/25 UEFA Champions League.
The Reds head to Milan after suffering a slender defeat to Nottingham Forest on Saturday, and Slot accepted that his team “should be disappointed” with the result which ended their unbeaten start to the Premier League campaign.
What did Arne Slot say?
Liverpool and AC Milan have conjured up some of the greatest footballing stories in the history of the beautiful game, perhaps none more so than their meeting in the 2005 UEFA Champions League final in Istanbul.
Almost two decades later, the pair of European stalwarts are meeting again: this time to open their respective campaigns in a competition that has undergone an extensive reformatting, transitioning a six-game group stage into an eight-team ‘league phase’.
After meeting the Rossoneri in Milan on Tuesday, Liverpool will face off against Bologna, RB Leipzig, Bayer Leverkusen, Real Madrid, Girona, Lille and PSV. Arne Slot is set to have a baptism of fire on the European stage as Liverpool boss, but the Dutchman insisted that he’s not ‘scared’ of facing the Italian giants.
Asked by an Italian journalist about his feelings ahead of the clash during Monday’s pre-match press conference, Slot replied: “I don’t know if the translation is correct but the word ‘scared’ was used, if I was scared for some players, or for us in Milan. I don’t think any manager or any team is scared to play the other team but we have a lot of respect for the quality and the players and the history of Milan.”
Embed from Getty Images“The first [player] that comes to my mind is a Dutch player – Tijjani Reijnders – who has done really well over here [in Italy] and also for the Dutch national team last week. So, they have quality players. We’re not scared but we do respect all of their players because they have shown last Saturday that they are in good form. They had a very good 4-0 win [against Venezia]. So, we respect Milan a lot, but ‘scared’ is not the word we would use.”
While Paulo Fonseca’s side picked up their first league win of the season on the weekend, Liverpool were dealt their first defeat at the hands of Nottingham Forest. The result has been heavily criticised by the media, and Slot assured fans that “the team and me were really disappointed as well, although we always put it in the right perspective.”
“When we beat [Manchester] United, the journalists and us were really positive, of course, but I also saw things we had to improve. Last Saturday we didn’t do as many things as we did against United, but there were still a few things that went quite well.”
“But it was a totally different game and that’s also for tomorrow, I expect a completely different game against Milan with the type of players they have and the playing style that manager has compared to Nottingham Forest. But we should be disappointed if you lose a home game against Nottingham Forest and you work for Liverpool.”
“If you are not [disappointed] if you drop points in a home game against Nottingham Forest then something is wrong. Four games, nine points, it’s a good start, but it’s not a great start – because then we would’ve had 12,” he added.
Embed from Getty ImagesLiverpool will be looking to bounce back against AC Milan on Tuesday by picking up three points to kickstart their 2024/25 UEFA Champions League campaign, though some uncertainty remains as to how many points will be required to qualify for the knockout stages of the tournament.
Each competing team will face eight different teams throughout the league phase, as opposed to the past system that consisted of home-and-away ties against three clubs. Slot conceded that “it’s difficult for me to tell you how many points are needed [to qualify] because it’s the first time we play this competition with eight games.”
“It’s difficult to say before you start, but I think it’s clear if you want to end up in the first eight you have to win a lot of games and you need a lot of points. What I think about the format, that’s also something you can ask me better in the end.”
“The only thing I like about it is just as someone who loves to see football every night on television is that every night there is a nice fixture. In the former format sometimes there were evenings where you were like, ‘OK, tomorrow is a nicer game than today’. But now, for example with our game tomorrow, I think everybody who loves football is looking forward to that game. That is the positive for the person that sits at home in front of his television.”
“How is it going to be for the players with two extra games? How is it going to be excited in the end of the group stages as well? That’s something that we have to find out. I don’t think anyone has the answer to that at the moment. But if you ask me this question in a few months I can answer it probably much better than I can answer it now,” Slot concluded, hinting at Carlo Ancelotti’s concerns that the schedule is ‘too demanding’.