Arne Slot previews Saturday's Merseyside derby as Liverpool travel to face Everton at Goodison Park for the final time in the league
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LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND - DECEMBER 01: (THE SUN OUT, THE SUN ON SUNDAY OUT) Arne Slot head coach of Liverpool during the Premier League match between Liverpool FC and Manchester City FC at Anfield on December 01, 2024 in Liverpool, England. (Photo by Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
Arne Slot during the Premier League match between Liverpool and Manchester City at Anfield earlier this month
(Image: Andrew Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)
There's a message that adorns the walls of AXA Training Centre's press room, accompanied by a silhouette of its famously skyline, that claims Liverpool to be "a city like no other". Liverpool and Everton fans of the region may spend their time at loggerheads about virtually every aspect of football, but they will at least find middle ground on that particular statement.
Such an acute mix of uniqueness and pride extends to the area's preeminent football fixture, too. After all, the Merseyside derby is the game played between the two clubs in closest Premier League proximity.
Just 0.8 miles separates Anfield from Goodison Park but the two clubs have, for a long time now, had a gulf in class between them on the pitch. Everton, whose wait for silverware will stretch to 30 years in 2025, have won just three derbies since the turn of the 2010s during a period where their counterparts have lifted every top-level trophy available at least once.
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The 106th and final league meeting between these two at the historic home of the Blues, however, affords Sean Dyche's side the opportunity to make it back-to-back successes against their age-old enemies on Saturday lunchtime. It would be the first time that has happened since 1985 and for a team who venture across Stanley Park likely for one last time with genuine Premier League title aspirations, this particular derby has the potential to become a major pitfall en route.
How much will the sense of finality at Goodison Park seep into the hosts' performance on the day itself? That is the pertinent question of this particular derby day.
As chance would have it, Arne Slot possesses a member of his coaching staff who is poised to offer plenty of insight into what this fixture means to those on the inside of Goodison Park in coach John Heitinga.
Heitinga, who joined Slot's coaching staff over the summer after a spell with West Ham United, made 157 appearances for the Toffees between 2009 and 2012 and is as well placed as anyone to offer his boss some real knowledge into the inner workings of his former club.
Slot spent most of Thursday analysing Everton by watching back April's miserable 2-0 defeat at Goodison Park, and feels Dyche won't deviate too far from a game plan that secured a first home win since October 2010 that evening.
"It is not like we (Slot and Heitinga) have a conversation like: ‘Now tell me everything you know about that game'. But if you are sitting down together he talks about how he felt about that game, like some others including the person next to me and some others who are in this building," Slot says.
"Everybody is of course talking at the moment about the special game that is coming up but that only happens after the Newcastle game. In the last half year I knew this was a big game.
"I’m mainly focused on what we have to expect and what we have to do. If you sit down for a while and don’t think about tactics, people do talk about to you about the importance of this game."
An injury-hit and out-of-form Liverpool were deservedly beaten by their hosts as the emotional drain of Jurgen Klopp's long goodbye began to manifest on the pitch itself in the closing weeks of last season. But despite the circumstances and context surrounding that loss, the current head coach still feels much could be gleaned from viewing it back with a fresh pair of eyes.
Of his pre-match preparatory work, Slot says: "I think the team can play better than they did over there [last season] but I always feel that the result always comes in your mind first and then second, third, fourth, and fifth.
"If you look at the game back, which I did, I was like ‘ooofh’ [Liverpool] had quite a lot of chances', which maybe a lot of people forgot because then you are 1-0 down and then everything is s***. I know how it works.
"They had their chances. The reason why I watched this game back was because the same manager is still there and our playing style is quite a lot the same and a lot of players are the same as what we have.
"So maybe, maybe we can expect something similar to what they did last season. So I looked at a few games back from the last three or four that they played, and I looked back at what their tactics were last season.
"After a certain moment, maybe half an hour, I was like, ‘they have many free-kicks’, so then I was interested to see what happened and then I saw that after half an hour they had 10 free-kicks and we had one."
An Everton side who went the entire month of November without a goal welcome the Premier League leaders to Goodison having scored just 14 in as many games this term. The performances have failed to yield results, Wednesday's 4-0 hammering of Wolves aside, and the Blues entertain the Reds at a time when they sit just five points above the relegation zone.
Slot, though, rejects the idea that Dyche has an overreliance on set-pieces or that his opposite number prefers a more agricultural style, saying: "You ask me the question because you feel they play a lot of long balls?
"I don’t completely agree because I see them bringing the ball out from the back many times as well. It depends on what the opponent does. If they are fine to play, they play. What they do do and that is a bit similar to Brentford, for example, is if they have a free-kick or a throw-in somewhere around the goal, and around is quite a big area, they tend to bring it in.
"But that is not something new. You also see this at Arsenal. One of their strengths is their set-pieces and they use it a lot. I think Sean Dyche has certain things that other managers also have in the league. I don’t think that he is on his own for a certain style of play. That is not how I saw it when I watched the game back.
"I wouldn’t say a lot of long balls but a lot of set plays and set plays are mostly played through the air. You can bring the ball out from the back to your attackers over the ground and you can also play it long and then fight for the second ball.
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"That is also what we do once in a while. If you want to press us really high, we also play the ball to our strikers to bring them into promising situations. It is not that they do something we never do or any other team in the league does.
"Maybe they do it a bit more than us so that if we have time to play we will. But the way to play against them is in an ideal world to press them so well that we have the ball a lot. And if we have the ball then we have to try and play our own game which we were able to do in the second half against Newcastle and only in parts of the first half and that is what we should do better."
A fixture like no other? Perhaps not quite, but Liverpool's meetings with Everton have produced the most red cards (23) and goalless draws (12) in the Premier League era, which might not exactly enthuse those of a neutral persuasion, if there are any of those dotted around Merseyside on Saturday morning. There won't be many.