Arne Slot praises 3 players after Bologna win but Liverpool frustrations evident

Arne Slot gave a mixed assessment of his side's performance after Liverpool recorded an eighth win of the season against Bologna in the Champions League.

The Reds were not at their best at Anfield but two moments of Mohamed Salah brilliance proved to be the difference as he assisted Alexis Mac Allister's opening goal of the match before firing home a second-half rocket to secure victory.

Slot praised Bologna for pressing high, man-marking and keeping the ball well, but admitted his players' intensity levels dropped towards the end of the first half and that he instructed them to pick things up after the break.

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Slot told TNT Sports: "I said during half-time... it's difficult because if you have a team that man marks all over the pitch and you play a long ball and you don't win it and they have the ball again, I see sometimes [our players'] heads go down a bit. 'Again a loss of the ball, again a loss of the ball' - and then they (Liverpool's players) wait too long before they start pressing again, and then you give the initiative away. That happened too much in the first half.

"The second half we started off pressing much better and we had more control in the second half than in the first half. With the ball, it's not easy if they are constantly 1 v 1. I don't think our goalkeeper in the first eight games touched the ball as many times as he did today but he was the only player that was free because they played man v man, then we kept the ball better in the second half than we did in the first."

Despite acknowledging the room for improvement in Liverpool's game, Slot reserved specific praise for three players: countryman Ryan Gravenberch, and center-backs Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konate.

"I was delighted with him," Slot said of Gravenberch. "I said after the game, again a big performance, he played really well because, again, I come back to this man v man [marking that Bologna's players were doing]... if you have a player who can turn away from his man, you immediately have an overload and I think that happened in the first minute when Virgil played him (Gravenberch) in and he turned away. We were a bit unlucky and not perfect in the last ball, but Ryan was outstanding again today.

"What I was [also] delighted with, is if I look at Ibou [Konate] and Virgil [van Dijk], and how they throw themselves in front of the ball, how they do everything to keep a clean sheet... I think that's the mentality we need to keep a clean sheet."