Liverpool boss Arne Slot has made a massive change in training ahead of the thrilling clash against Manchester City.
On Sunday afternoon, Liverpool will travel to the Etihad Stadium for perhaps their toughest fixture of the Premier League season against recent rivals Manchester City.
Following Arsenal’s shock 1-0 loss to London rivals West Ham United at the Emirates on Saturday, the stakes couldn’t be higher for Liverpool going into Sunday’s match.
And it would appear that this is not lost of Liverpool manager Slot, who has decided to make a major change to training ahead of the big match.
Typically before a match of such a massive importance, players would he hard at work in training ensuring that they are ready to perform to the best of their ability when the whistle blows.
However, Slot has decided to take a different approach, as he moved Liverpool’s pre-match press conference to Thursday instead of Friday in order to give his team an extra day of rest before the trip to the Etihad.
This isn’t the only big change that Slot has made to pre-game preparations since he replace legendary manager Jurgen Klopp over the summer, as he also has allowed his players to stay at home rather than in a hotel before home games
Explaining why he sometimes makes these decisions last month, Slot said: “If possible, we always prefer to have them off three days before a game, it’s not always possible, but we try.”
Earlier in the season, this exact plan appeared to work perfectly as Slot put it in place ahead of Liverpool’s 2-0 win over City on December just four days after defeating European giants Real Madrid at Anfield.
Back in October, the Dutch manager revealed to Sky Sports if he had introduced new rules at Liverpool, stating: “Maybe we’ve implemented one or two, but if you ask me which ones, I don’t even know which they are.
There was a real good culture of players being on time, so I hate if we have to talk about fines and all these kinds of things for players being too late – it’s normal that you are on time. But that culture was already here. I can’t come up actually with a rule that I have changed.”
