Ex-Liverpool striker: Many clubs would ‘sack their manager’ if they had results like Arne Slot’s
Arne Slot may well have been sacked already if he were at a different club, but he deserves the opportunity to ‘turn things around’ at Liverpool.
That’s according to Emile Heskey, who’s continued to back the Reds’ head coach whilst acknowleding that the Dutchman needs to get some wins under his belt quickly, starting with the visit to West Ham today.
With the Premier League champions losing nine of their last 12 matches and waking up this morning 13th in the table, Jamie Carragher has warned that anything less than seven points from our three matches this week would make the 47-year-old’s position at Anfield ‘untenable’.
Heskey claims sacking Slot would be ‘too drastic’
However, one of the Bootle native’s former teammates is hoping that Liverpool will give Slot the time to guide the Reds out of their current slump and back towards the standards they set in his first season in charge.
The ex-England striker told The Mirror: “The current run would see a lot of clubs sack their manager, but most of these wouldn’t have won the title last season.
“Slot is looking over his shoulder, and the West Ham game is massive. You heap more pressure on yourself the more games you go without winning while shipping goals, but sacking him? That’s too drastic. He needs an opportunity to turn things around.”
Slot needs to get Liverpool back to winning ways quickly
Some media personalities (such as Bild’s Marcel Reif) have sought to undermine the current head coach’s position by speaking openly about the possibility of a return to Anfield for his illustrious predecessor Jurgen Klopp.
As much as we idolise the German, such a narrative is hugely disrespectful towards the incumbent boss, whose achievements in his first season at Liverpool – while not buying him a free pass for eternity – shouldn’t be disregarded so readily.
However, Heskey is also right in saying that Slot may well have lost his job already had he been at a club with a more trigger-happy hierarchy, and that he needs a run of victories soon to ease the growing pressure.
Although West Ham have enjoyed an improvement of late, today’s match is one from which – with the greatest of respect to the 17th-placed Irons – Liverpool can’t be satisfield with anything less than three points. The same goes for the fixtures against Sunderland and Leeds later in the week.
If the Reds can take either seven or nine points from that triple header, they’d almost certainly find themselves in a much healthier position in the table and would at least have some confidence restored ahead of the festive period.
The opportunity is there to flip the narrative quickly – Slot and his players must grasp it.
You can watch Slot’s full post-PSV press conference via Empire of the Kop on YouTube:
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