Liverpool head coach Arne Slot was full of praise for his side’s devastating attacking performance at Tottenham Hotspur, but warned the Premier League leaders against complacency after Spurs briefly threatened an unlikely comeback.
The Reds were 5-1 up and cruising thanks to a quickfire second-half double from Mohamed Salah with just over an hour played, before Dejan Kulusevski and former Liverpool striker Dominic Solanke pulled it back to 5-3.
Luis Diaz scored his second five minutes from time to make it 6-3 and finally end a crazy contest, which Slot said was Liverpool’s best away performance of his tenure.
“Until 60-65 minutes (in), I really, really, really enjoyed what I saw,” Slot told reporters.
“But then you also saw that, no matter how much quality players have, they think they don’t have to run anymore.
“In this league, especially against Tottenham because they are so good with the ball as well, they immediately start to create. And that’s what they did, and they scored two goals. I was happy that the sixth one went in, to be fair.”
The Liverpool boss, who has enjoyed a near-flawless start to life at Anfield, accepted that “maybe it is human that if you are 5-1 up, you think ‘OK'”.
“I exaggerate a bit if I say they don’t run anymore,” he conceded.
“Of course they still run, but they don’t run to crosses anymore, they don’t defend in front of the goal, where until that moment it was every time, wherever the ball was, we were there with two, three, four players.”
But Slot said his players needed to be more ruthless, telling reporters: “You have to be on top of your game every second of the game. And if you’re not 100%, then it immediately hurts you.”
Slot, who won the Dutch league with Feyenoord before joining Liverpool, was happy to be top of the league at Christmas but said there was a long way to go.
“Of course it means something, because you always prefer to be where we are at the moment … but you know just as well as I know, because I’ve won the [Dutch] league once, how hard it is to win it,” he said.
“You have to keep on going, keep on going, every three days you have to be on top of your game, every minute of the game.
“That’s why it’s so hard to win it, because it’s not always easy to show up every three or four days.”
