Captain Virgil van Dijk says Arne Slot was furious in the away dressing room after Liverpool slumped to a 2-1 Premier League defeat at the hands of bottom club Wolverhampton Wanderers.<\/p>\n
The league champions were architects of their own downfall as Andre grabbed a deflected 94th-minute winner at Molineux. The Dutch defender admitted after the game that fifth-placed Liverpool now have little margin for error if they are going to secure Champions League qualification this season.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah he (Slot, head coach) was angry,\u201d Van Dijk said. \u201cOf course and he had every right to be angry because we played poorly. Second half maybe there was more urgency but it still wasn\u2019t good enough.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very disappointing. It\u2019s down to us to learn from it and turn it around, but it\u2019s tough for us to take and it\u2019s tough for our fans to take.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe come back here on Friday in the FA Cup and we want to go far in that competition. We have to turn up here on Friday with a totally different quality and different performance on the pitch.\u201d<\/p>\n
Asked about the possible impact of missing out on the Champions League in terms of the club\u2019s summer transfer business, Van Dijk added: \u201c100 per cent. The stakes are very high.<\/p>\n
\u201cListen, if you play for Liverpool, it\u2019s always been like that. It\u2019s down to us, together with our fans, to get the results we need to get into the Champions League.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow the decisive period starts. We have to just go for it. We have to take this on the chin. No matter how hard it is to take.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mohamed Salah ended his Premier League goal drought by cancelling out Rodrigo Gomes\u2019 opener, but Slot\u2019s side were alarmingly open in the closing stages having posed so little attacking threat earlier in the contest.<\/p>\n
\u201cBased on our performance up until they scored their first goal, we deserved to go 1-0 behind,\u201d Van Dijk said. \u201cWe were very poor. We were too slow and predictable in possession. We made the wrong decisions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t concede any big chances up to that point. Defensively, we were still solid. But towards the end, when the game started to open up, any team can become dangerous and that\u2019s what happened.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe opening goal came from a long ball that we lost up high. It was a big space to defend. There was still plenty of time to turn it around. We scored the equaliser but then it became very chaotic. We went back to making the wrong decisions when we had the ball.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe we wanted to force the winner too much. It looked and felt very much like a basketball game in those last five to 10 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Captain Virgil van Dijk says Arne Slot was furious in the away dressing room after Liverpool slumped to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":514288,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,1417,561,82],"class_list":["post-514287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-liverpool","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=514287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/514287\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/514288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=514287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=514287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=514287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}