Arne Slot press conference: The head coach's verdict on Galatasaray 1

On how he sums up the night…

Disappointing because you play football to win a game and that’s what we didn’t do. For me it was a different loss to the one we had against [Crystal] Palace because for me there was a lot more to like, especially in the first half, which was maybe different to the Palace game. And in the second half, it became harder and harder for us to create. First of all, because they were fighting with all they had so you have to give credit to them and second of all because we hardly played in the second half. By ‘hardly played’ I mean the ball was hardly in play.

On whether the rotation of his squad is having an impact and leading to individual mistakes…

It’s difficult. There can be so many reasons why an individual makes an error pass or a mistake. What you see is, and I think I explained this many times, is that there are a few players from us that missed pre-season so you simply cannot play them every single [game]. Well, you can but then that could become a risk of players becoming injured. We have seen this more and more because the demands go up more and more and if the demands go up you have to prepare players for these demands. That means it is not always that I want to rotate but sometimes I need to because a player is not ready to play three times 90 minutes in seven or eight days.

I like my squad so much but we don’t have 25 or 26 [players], so if we end up with two, three or four injuries, 15 or 16 players, where Rio [Ngumoha] and Trey [Nyoni] are two of these 15 or 16, need to play almost all the minutes and then things can become complicated. But this is a decision we have made together, I completely believe in this, because if you have 25 it’s very hard to manage your squad. But as a result of that, with Hugo, Alex [Isak], Conor [Bradley] and [Alexis] Mac Allister not having the pre-season a player should have, that also results in the fact that I cannot play them every time.

On his selections on the right flank, with Jeremie Frimpong playing ahead of Dominik Szoboszlai…

Jeremie played a lot of times as a wing-back or a right winger at [Bayer] Leverkusen. He played there in pre-season for us. He is one of the players that can replace Mo [Salah] in that position. I don’t see many others that can play in that position which is favoured to them, and I think it is one of Jeremie’s favourite positions. He plays there for the national team always.

Normally, normally, normally they [Galatasaray] play with the left winger inverted and the full-back really high. So, the left winger goes in the midfield and Dom is in the midfield and Jeremie is some kind of a wing-back, but they did it the opposite today, which happens more to us that they change something.

But I think both of them can play really well in that position and I’ve just explained also that Conor missed out quite a lot in pre-season. So that also means he cannot play every single game so you consider which game is best for which player. Mo has played a lot of minutes already, so we decided to do it like this today and in the first half I was quite happy.

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