Bitter Liverpool star hits out at Forest’s tactics as they ‘only wanted’ to do two things – ‘it was a shame’

Brazil goalkeeper Alisson Becker hit out at Nottingham Forest’s tactics after Liverpool lost 1-0 at Anfield against Nuno Espirito Santo’s side on Saturday.

Before the international break, Liverpool made a superb start to the season under new head coach Arne Slot as they won their first three Premier League games.

The Reds were optimistic during the international break, but they crashed back down to earth on Saturday afternoon.

Liverpool produced a sub-par performance as they suffered a 1-0 loss against Forest, who claimed all three points as Callum Hudson-Odoi netted the only goal of the game off the bench.

Speaking post-match, Slot admitted he was far from happy with Liverpool’s performance, while Alisson had a dig at Forest over their tactics.

“It was a shame, losing points at home is not good at all but the opponent today only wanted to defend and play for the long ball,” Alisson said.

“We gave them that too easily when they scored, it was poor defensively from us.

“We couldn’t create much, we had a lack of quality today, we needed more energy.

“It is three points we have lost today unnecessarily.

“All the opportunities we had were not clear enough and they defended great, they threw themselves in front of the ball.”

Slot has revealed what “frustrated him the most” about Liverpool’s loss to Nottm Forest.

“The result frustrates the most and we cannot be happy about how the game went. It was a stop-start game and we hardly created any chances,” Slot said.

“We only have to look at ourselves, we have to be better. Far too many times we lost the ball around the area, it was not good enough. We have to be better with the ball. Our decisions and execution wasn’t good enough.

“In general we defended quite well but the two fast players came on and made it difficult. We took a lot of risk and in the end it was a very good goal.”

He added: “It is a big setback. If you lose a home game that’s always a setback.

“Normally this team isn’t ending up in top 10, so if you lose a game against them that’s a big disappointment, although they were organised and structured really well today.

“The only thing we had influence on was ball possession because they played a lot of long balls, so if you then take the ball back you need to go past 11 players.

“We had a lot of ball possession but only managed to create three or four quite good chances. That’s by far not enough.

“If you have so much possession and play so much in their half we need to be much better, we lost the ball so many times in simple situations.

“That’s the main story from the game – ball possession was not good enough.”