\n<\/p>\n
Arne Slot welcomed an emphatic end to Liverpool\u2019s losing run but fears he could be without Alexander Isak for several weeks after the British record signing sustained a groin problem against Eintracht Frankfurt.<\/p>\n
Liverpool produced a 5-1 rout in Germany with Slot\u2019s call for set-piece improvement answered by two goals from corners by Virgil van Dijk and Ibrahima Konat\u00e9. The win ended a sequence of four successive defeats for the Premier League champions but Isak had to be withdrawn after 45 minutes of his second start in four days. Slot believes the workload may have been too much for the striker, who missed most of pre-season at Newcastle in his attempt to force a \u00a3125m move to Liverpool.<\/p>\n
Jeremie Frimpong is also facing another spell on the sidelines after sustaining his second hamstring injury of the season.<\/p>\n
Slot said of Isak: \u201cLet\u2019s hope it\u2019s not that bad, but he had to go off because he felt his groin. Many people wanted me to play him more and we had to find the balance and unfortunately today that balance didn\u2019t work out for us perfectly. But let\u2019s hope for the best. When he came to the club, he had hardly trained. So you bring him step by step forward and then you feel there must be a moment where he can play twice a week, and the first time we try \u2013 he did it with Sweden as well \u2013 he has to go off.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Liverpool head coach denied taking a risk on the Sweden international by starting him twice in quick succession. \u201cAlex wasn\u2019t in the red zone because we wouldn\u2019t have played him,\u201d he said. \u201cNormally you try to prepare players for once\u2011a\u2011week football, but if you are Liverpool you play every three days or normally three times in eight days but we\u2019ve been unfortunate this season we have to play three times in seven days.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve tried to prepare him for that programme which is not always so easy when you don\u2019t have a pre\u2011season. We were really careful. He was perfectly fit when he came back from the national team and before the [Manchester] United game.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe thought he was well prepared for that but the margins at the top are small. I\u2019m hoping it won\u2019t be that bad, because if he\u2019s out for a few weeks it will put him back. So let\u2019s wait.\u201d<\/p>\n
Liverpool\u2019s performance had similarities to their recent defeats, Slot insisted, including: \u201cWe created a few chances before we conceded and the first chance we conceded was immediately a goal.<\/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 \u201cIn the end it turned out to be the only chance we conceded. Why was that? Because we went 3-1 up, so then it\u2019s easier to control the game when you\u2019re 1-0 down all the time. We were able to score two set-pieces and that made a big, big difference.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Arne Slot welcomed an emphatic end to Liverpool\u2019s losing run but fears he could be without Alexander Isak for several weeks after the British record signing sustained a groin problem against Eintracht Frankfurt. Liverpool produced a 5-1 rout in Germany with Slot\u2019s call for set-piece improvement answered by two goals from corners by Virgil van<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29905,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[8689,1732,2017,17598,1124,1597,8374,3504,1199,8690],"class_list":{"0":"post-29904","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-arne","9":"tag-champions","10":"tag-forced","11":"tag-frankfurt","12":"tag-hope","13":"tag-injured","14":"tag-isak","15":"tag-league","16":"tag-left","17":"tag-slot"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29904","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=29904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/29905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}