'Done very well' - Arne Slot praises Liverpool summer arrival from AS Monaco

Arne Slot heaped praise on the work that Liverpool coach Aaron Briggs has carried out since his arrival - as it bore fruit against Manchester City.

The Reds moved 11 points clear at the top of the Premier League with a 2-0 win at the Etihad Stadium. The breakthrough arrived in the 13th minute against the run of play. Liverpool won a corner and produced a routine off the training ground to score. Alexis Mac Allister fired in a pass to Dominik Szoboszlai at the near post and he helped the ball on for an unmarked Mo Salah to finish.

Briggs joined Liverpool’s backroom staff in the summer after Slot succeeded Jurgen Klopp in the Anfield hot seat. Arriving from AS Monaco, Briggs holds the title of first team individual development coach but is also responsible for set-pieces.

What’s been said

Slot believes that dead-ball scenarios are ‘vital’ and that proved the case when they opened the scoring against City. And the Liverpool boss reckons the work of Briggs - who is a former City senior analyst - and other members of his coaching team who arrived at the start of the season, will only get stronger. Speaking at his post-match press conference, Slot said: “He has done his work very, very, very well and you don’t always see the result of that during games because many times we were close to scoring.

“I always say, people might not know it over here yet, but if you go to Holland then people say, ‘There he is again about his set-pieces.’ But if you want to win a big game then you need to have a neutral balance in set-pieces or a positive one. So, if we go to Villa away and they score [from a set-piece] and we don’t, it is so hard to win against a Villa or a Chelsea or an Arsenal.

“And today it was the opposite: we scored from a set-piece and that gives you such a boost for this game because, at that moment of time, it wasn’t that we were dominating the game. It wasn’t expected that we could score at any second, so yeah, set-pieces are vital. We started with a new group of people this season and we need to give them a bit of time because I think – that’s also what you see at Arsenal, when they started working it wasn’t immediate, it takes a bit of time before you see the result – and that’s what we’re hoping for in the upcoming 11 [games] as well.”

‘Numbers speak for themselves’

Salah’s opening goal saw him move on to 30 for the season in all competitions. Slot believes those numbers ‘speak for themselves’ and was delighted by the positions the Reds managed to find for their talisman. He added: “I think the numbers speak for themselves. What pleased me most today is that mostly we have – in every game apart from this one I think, and maybe the home game against City or Chelsea – more ball possession so that means we bring him many, many, many times in promising positions.

“But today there wasn’t that many moments we could bring him in promising positions, but these seven, eight, nine or 10 moments that we gave him the ball in those positions he was every time a threat and that probably tells you even more the quality player he is, because it’s not so easy for an attacker if he has to defend, defend, defend. And then he gets the ball and does something special, that’s sometimes difficult but at the moment not many things seem difficult for Mo.”