\n<\/p>\n
Virgil van Dijk insisted Liverpool should not panic despite back-to-back defeats for only the second time under Arne Slot at Galatasaray. Injuries to Alisson and Hugo Ekitik\u00e9 added to Liverpool\u2019s worries as their head coach defended the performance and his decision to rest Mohamed Salah in Istanbul.<\/p>\n
Victor Osimhen\u2019s first-half penalty condemned Liverpool to defeat in the Champions League. The Premier League leaders had relinquished their 100% winning start to the season at Crystal Palace on Saturday but Van Dijk was adamant that a remodelled team will recapture title-winning form.<\/p>\n
The Liverpool captain said: \u201cI think we have showed it already in many games this season but we haven\u2019t shown it for the full 90 minutes yet unfortunately. It is absolutely normal and nowadays you don\u2019t get the time from the outside world so you have to be strong mentally.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am very confident. We have to keep working and sticking together. We had a good start this year in terms of points tally. There shouldn\u2019t be panic, but improvement is needed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Slot confirmed that the goalkeeper Alisson will miss the trip to Chelsea on Saturday with a muscle problem. Ekitik\u00e9 was also withdrawn in the second half with an unspecified injury, after going down holding the back of his leg late on.<\/p>\n
\u201cAlisson felt something when he sprinted back,\u201d Slot said. \u201cNormally when a player sprints back and feels something and goes to the floor and doesn\u2019t come back to the pitch \u2013 which by the way they did 112 times being injured and coming back on the pitch without any pain \u2013 then I fear the worst and that is what happened with Alisson. He will not be able to play Saturday, 99.9%.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Liverpool\u2019s latest defeat, the head coach said: \u201cFor me it was a different loss to the one we had against Palace because there was a lot more to like, especially in the first half.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the second half it became harder and harder for us to create because first of all they were fighting with all they had and you have to give credit to them, and secondly the ball was hardly in play in the second half.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Sign up to Football Daily<\/span><\/p>\n Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Slot said he rested Salah until the 62nd minute to avoid risking injury following the forward\u2019s recent workload.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Virgil van Dijk insisted Liverpool should not panic despite back-to-back defeats for only the second time under Arne Slot at Galatasaray. Injuries to Alisson and Hugo Ekitik\u00e9 added to Liverpool\u2019s worries as their head coach defended the performance and his decision to rest Mohamed Salah in Istanbul. Victor Osimhen\u2019s first-half penalty condemned Liverpool to defeat<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[1732,546,8647,15143,1326,743,3504,2069,742,7706,7103],"class_list":{"0":"post-25006","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-champions","9":"tag-days","10":"tag-defeat","11":"tag-dijks","12":"tag-dont","13":"tag-fans","14":"tag-league","15":"tag-liverpool","16":"tag-message","17":"tag-panic","18":"tag-van"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25006\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}