Slot selection wrong - but defending is not good enough right now

ARNE SLOT hasn't got much wrong during his time in charge at Liverpool. But he certainly made an error with his team selection at Crystal Palace on Saturday.

- JOHN ALDRIDGE

Florian Wirtz and Mohamed Salah (inset below) both struggled at Selhurst Park on Saturday

From the very first whistle, you could see the plan to have Florian Wirtz as a floating attacking midfielder simply wasn't going to work.

But it wasn't on Wirtz that so many of his teammates were massively below par. It was strange that so many should have been off it on the same day.

Liverpool, though, should have known an awful lot better. They were given a clear indication of what to expect when they faced Palace in the Community Shield at Wembley last month.

Palace do the same things - they defend well, they have strong, quick players up top, are good at set-pieces and are dangerous on the counterattack.

We didn't seem to learn from any of that.

Our two fullbacks were pushing on and it isolated our two centre-backs and allowed the Palace forwards to just run at them with the Liverpool midfield not doing their job properly either.