Arne Slot press conference: Every word on Carabao Cup final defeat

The Reds’ attempt to defend the trophy was thwarted at the last hurdle on Sunday afternoon as the Magpies prevailed in the capital.

Dan Burn’s header opened the scoring on the stroke of half-time and that was followed soon after the interval by an Alexander Isak finish.

Substitute Federico Chiesa struck back four minutes into stoppage time to give Slot’s men brief hope, but it proved too little, too late.

Read Slot’s post-match press conference in full below.

On how he is feeling…

Disappointing result, disappointing performance. So, completely different than I felt after the Paris Saint-Germain game. Losing twice in a row is something I think we do for the first time. But that probably also comes with going into the latter stages of a tournament, so facing Paris Saint-Germain and Newcastle in a final are two very good teams, both in their own styles. But very difficult teams to face, because we already knew from the game at St. James’ Park how difficult it is to beat them. It was a tough week but it was also a week where we extended our lead [in the Premier League] to 12 points from it being 10, so it wasn’t all negative. But the last two were definitely not the way we wanted it to be.

On whether Liverpool were physically or mentally fatigued on the day, or a combination of both, after Tuesday’s game against Paris Saint-Germain…

Mentally, it’s always difficult to judge. Were we on Tuesday mentally or physically tired? No. But this game had nothing to do with running, this game had only to do with playing duels and there was no intensity in terms of running in this game at all. So you cannot even judge it if we were tired yes or no, physically, because we could not press them. You can judge a team if they are tired and they press. But there was nothing to press because they played over our press. If they got a goal-kick or if they got a free-kick – which they had quite a lot of in the first half – they every time brought it into our last line, which led to a lot of set-pieces.

So, the game was slow and not intense, so it’s difficult to judge for me if we were physically ready. Mentally, that’s always a difficult one. If you look at the result and the performance you might feel it maybe did something to us, but I prefer to look at how the game went. And this game went exactly the way they wanted it to be: a fight with a lot of duels and a lot of duels through the air. And if we play 10 times a game of football through the air against them, they win it probably nine times because they are a stronger team through the air than us, which led to the first goal and the second goal because the second goal was also a header that they won at the second post that fell for Isak and led to the 2-0.

On Alexis Mac Allister marking Burn from a corner for the opening goal…

Again, credit to Newcastle. But I can explain. We play zonal so we have five players zonally close to our goal, so if the ball falls there it is always one of the five stronger players that are going to attack that ball. And we have three players that man-mark and Macca is one of them. Normally a player like Dan Burn or another one runs to the zone because normally… I think he’s an exception to that because I have never seen in my life a player from that far away heading a ball with so much force into the far corner. That is part of logic, that they either have to go far away from our zone, which 99 out of 100 times that will never lead to a goal, or they have to arrive in our zone and then it’s an equal battle, if you want to call it like this. So credit to him, I think he’s one of the few players that can score a goal from that distance with his head.

Click here to read article