Arne Slot hasn’t forgotten what Gary Neville said about Liverpool before the start of the 2024/25 season!
When the Sky Sports pundit gave his Premier League predictions at the outset of the campaign, he had the Reds down to finish in fifth place, claiming that they’d suffer a post-Jurgen Klopp hangover.
Fast forward to Sunday evening, when the Merseysiders emphatically dispatched Manchester City to extend their lead at the top of the table to nine points, and the ex-Manchester United defender went on to declare that LFC are now ‘incredible favourites’ to win the title.
Slot began his pre-Newcastle press conference on Tuesday morning with a reference to that volte-face from Neville, telling reporters (via Liverpool Echo): “Gary Neville had a different opinion about us at the start of the season!”
Once he’d gotten that cheeky dig out of the way, the Reds boss continued: “I’ve said many times already, we don’t look at it like this [LFC being title favourites]. We know we have a difficult week coming up. I think it’s even harder going away to Newcastle. We’re not even halfway through the season yet.”
Not even the most ardent and optimistic of Liverpool fans would’ve expected us to be nine points clear just 13 games into the Premier League season, but Neville predicting us to miss out on the top four in August looks an increasingly comical take with each passing week.
It shows just how emphatically the Reds have proven the summer doubters wrong that, within three-and-a-half months, the Sky Sports pundit has now changed the hymn sheet to claim that we’re firm favourites to win the title.
Maybe there’s an element of him making such a grandiose statement with an undercurrent of ‘If you lose it from here it’s an almighty bottle job’, a frightful scenario that the staunch United disciple would no doubt relish, but it nonetheless represents quite the revisionism from the 49-year-old.
As pleasing as Liverpool’s current position might be, Slot knows full well that so much can change even over the course of the next month, and we expect that he won’t get carried away with the status quo. Just as he has done up to now, he’ll take it one match at a time and see where it leaves his team.
The post Arne Slot takes cheeky dig at Gary Neville after Sky pundit’s drastic volte-face on Liverpool appeared first on The Empire of The Kop.
