Liverpool goalkeeper Alisson Becker took a subtle dig at the tactics employed by Nottingham Forest in their shock win at Anfield.
Callum Hudson-Odoi’s superb finish secured a 1-0 victory that represented Forest’s first victory in the red half for Merseyside for 55 years.
Having made a flawless start to life under Arne Slot, the Reds were expected to extend their winning run to four matches but came up against obdurate opponents who nullified the Reds’ star-studded attack.
Slot attempted to freshen up his forward line with the introductions of Darwin Nunez and Cody Gakpo, but it was a Forest substitute who had the decisive impact on the game, much to Alisson’s annoyance.
“It was a shame, losing points at home is not good at all but the opponent today only wanted to defend and play for the long ball.
‘We gave them that too easily when they scored, it was poor defensively from us,’ said the Brazil international.
‘We couldn’t create much, we had a lack of quality today, we needed more energy. It is three points we have lost today unnecessarily.
‘All the opportunities we had were not clear enough and they defended great, they threw themselves in front of the ball.’
This was Liverpool’s first match after an international break and it appeared to show as passes went astray with alarming regularity, the connections built up previously becoming severed quite quickly.
Liverpool had 10 players who played the full 90 minutes in both games for their international teams and the likes of Alexis Mac Allister and Luis Diaz travelled back from South America.
However, that is not out of the ordinary and Slot did not look to find excuses.
‘It’s always difficult, but I don’t think it had anything to do with it,’ said.
‘Players came back strong and I saw today a team that wanted to fight until the end. That wasn’t to do with energy.
‘If you look at the goals we scored until now, we scored quite a few from transition moments from winning the ball back, but the other team (Forest) played over our press a lot with a lot of long balls.
‘It wasn’t good enough today because too many individual performances in ball possession were not up to the standards that I’m used to from these players.’
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