Liverpool Draw with Chelsea: Frustration at Anfield
Arne Slot walked down the touchline to a chorus of boos, the noise cutting through the damp Anfield air as sharply as any late winner. It was only a 1-1 draw with Chelsea, but it felt heavier than that. This was another afternoon when Liverpool started like a title contender and finished like a team still learning what it wants to be.
They had the game where they wanted it early on. Liverpool flew out, scored, and should have buried Chelsea before the contest settled into something far more complicated. A goal on the board, a big chance from a set piece for 2-0, the crowd roaring – Slot’s blueprint flickered into life.
Then it slipped.
“We started off really well, scored a goal, got a big chance from a set piece where we were close to scoring a 2-0,” Slot told TNT Sports, his tone more analytical than angry. “Then in quite a large phase of the game we struggled to control their sixes, they were constantly able to find them and set up an attack.”
Chelsea adjusted, dragged bodies into midfield and began to pass through Liverpool. Slot’s side kept an extra defender as insurance, but it handed the visitors the spare man in the middle. In a game of this level, that kind of imbalance rarely goes unpunished.
The damage came from a familiar source. Another set piece. Another lapse.
“Unfortunately, like last week we conceded a set piece,” Slot said. “That makes it really hard in a top game to win a game of football if you have a negative balance in set pieces. Especially if you look at it and it’s such a sloppy goal, whatever word you want to use.”
It was the sort of goal that infuriates managers. “It wasn’t a great cross and no header, nobody touched it and it went in the second post.” No towering leap, no clever block, just a ball drifting all the way through and nestling in the far corner. Anfield groaned. Slot bristled.
Chelsea thought they had flipped the game completely right after the break, only for an offside call – “fractionally” off, as Slot put it – to spare Liverpool. That scare jolted the home side. From then on, it looked and felt like a different team.
“Second half, apart from the third minute where they scored where they were fractionally offside, I saw a team that had a completely different intent and a completely different intensity in terms of pressing,” Slot said.
The tweak came in the press, the manager abandoning the first-half caution and reshaping how Liverpool hunted the ball.
“They played with a lot of midfielders today, brought a lot of players towards the ball, and if you then go man to man, which we didn’t do, you have a chance to control them,” he explained. “But we kept plus one in the back for reasons I think is smart. That is why they constantly have a plus one and if these players have a plus one like Chelsea, they are able to play through them. The second half we changed our setup in terms of pressing a little bit. Not a little bit, a bit, and that worked better than in the first half.”
The pressure finally told in territory, if not on the scoreboard. Liverpool hemmed Chelsea in, created chances, rattled woodwork. Again.
“We were a few times close, like so many times this season. Hit the post, hit the bar, but not enough to win and that is why it ended 1-1.”
The raw numbers – three wins in the last five, one defeat, this draw – do not scream crisis. The mood at Anfield told a different story. When the board went up for Rio Ngumoha’s number, the discontent was immediate and loud.
Ngumoha had been one of the brightest lights in a grey afternoon. Fearless, direct, only 17 but playing as if the occasion barely registered. The boos were not for him. They were for the decision to take him off.
“I don’t think it was some of them, there were a lot that didn’t agree with that change,” Slot said with a laugh that carried a hint of resignation. “Which I completely understand if you just look at how he played.”
Then came the detail the stands did not have.
“It does make sense that three minutes before he goes to the floor and to the ground and having problems with his muscles and then I ask him, he said ‘hmm, not sure if I can continue’ and the idea was maybe not to take him off. But when he gave the signal he wasn’t completely ready to continue then it makes complete sense.”
Slot knew what the reaction would be. “He is such a popular figure and played a good 65 minutes. As is so often in football people don’t know everything and that how it works. It is what it is. I’m the manager I need to make decisions. Sometimes people are happy with them, sometimes they don’t. Today clearly they weren’t. Maybe knowing now why makes more sense for everyone.”
Inside the dressing room, the feeling matched the noise outside. Ryan Gravenberch did not bother to dress it up.
“Yeah, of course because we have to share the points. We wanted the three points but obviously they are a good team. They did very well here. I think at the end they deserved a point as well,” he said.
He, like everyone else in red, had seen enough to believe the game was there to be won.
“Of course. We create chances. The one with Dom [Szoboszlai] was a good save from him and the other one from Dom on the post and I think if we are then a bit lucky this one would go in. But in the end we didn’t make it so a bit disappointed.”
Gravenberch reserved his most pointed words for the final whistle reaction. The boos cut through the players as much as the manager.
“To be honest we need them behind us. What they do, okay, we don’t win, but I think we don’t really deserve this you know?” he said. “Fans have to keep behind us for 90 minutes because when I think it was the second half we then went behind us we needed it. Hopefully the next few games they will do the same.”
Slot, for his part, understood why the crowd snapped. “That probably has to do with us not winning,” he said. “So a draw for the last five games we’ve won three, lost last week and today a draw, that is not what we want, we want to win all five.”
Again he circled back to the set pieces, the thin margins that keep tilting the wrong way.
“Last week we had a negative balance in our set piece, today again conceding a set piece and we were very, very close with Virgil to score one ourselves, so it completely makes sense if people are disappointed if we don’t win. Because that is what we want. We want to win. It should be like that. If Liverpool doesn’t win then no one can be happy with that.”
Between the lines, the story of this Liverpool is already forming. A team capable of suffocating big opponents for long stretches, but still too generous at dead balls. A stadium desperate to believe, but quick to bristle when the old ruthlessness doesn’t appear on demand. A 17-year-old winger drawing some of the loudest emotions of the day.
The point keeps Liverpool moving, but not at the pace they demand of themselves. The set pieces, the missed chances, the uneasy soundtrack at full-time – they all ask the same question of Slot and his players: how long before performances like this turn into the kind of wins Anfield expects every single week?
