Arne Slot has come out to state that he expected a different outcome from his side’s meeting with Crystal Palace at Wembley for the 2025 Community Shield.
The FA Cup champions defeated the Premier League champions on penalties after a 2-2 stalemate at the end of regulation time. As is customary, the match went straight to penalties. Liverpool would end up missing three spot kicks, with Dean Henderson saving two. Palace, meanwhile, would bury three of theirs to lift the Shield for the first time in their history.
Arne Slot, whose pre-season has not gone entirely to plan, spoke about the outcome of the match, stating plainly that he did not expect the eventual outcome, having seen his side go ahead on two occasions.
“The main issue,” he began, “I don’t think there was a main issue unless if the other team misses two penalties and you still lose within five penalties, that of course doesn’t help. But I think in general, it was a game where we twice came one goal up and, in my opinion, we controlled the game until the moment they scored the 2-2.”
“Then, all of a sudden, although we still had one big chance for Mo Salah, we could have lost it in the end as well. But until that moment, [at] 2-1, there was every reason for me to expect that we would win this game. But after the 2-2, we were maybe lucky that we could go to penalties.”
Slot then spoke about his side’s poor pre-season and if he learned anything going into his title defence, after being prodded by the journalists.
“I think in the whole pre-season we saw that we are able to create more and we are more comfortable on the ball, we create more opportunities, chances, we dominate maybe even more,” he said.
“Last season we had a lot of ball possession but that didn’t always lead to promising situations. Now, we are better in creating and getting promising situations than we were, in my opinion, throughout the whole of last season.”
“But the other side is also true, that we have conceded four against Milan, one against the Japanese team [Yokohama F. Marinos], two against [Athletic Club] Bilbao and again two today. What made us really strong last season was we only won mostly by a margin of one goal and that had mostly to do with us keeping a clean sheet or as a maximum conceding one goal. Today we scored twice against Palace, last season we were not able to do that once – we beat them 1-0 and we had a 1-1 draw at Anfield. That’s the positive.”
