Arne Slot pays huge compliment to Nottingham Forest as he revises his stance on Liverpool defeat

Arne Slot has heaped significant praise on Nottingham Forest ahead of Liverpool’s visit to the City Ground on Tuesday night.

The fixture takes place four months to the day that Nuno Espirito Santo’s team inflicted the Reds’ only Premier League defeat of the season so far, and to the surprise of many it pits together two of the division’s current top three clubs.

The Garibaldi have won their last seven matches in all competitions, and should that streak continue tomorrow, they’ll close to within three points of the table-topping Merseysiders, albeit with a game more played.

Slot says Forest are genuine title contenders

Slot held his pre-match press conference on Monday morning ahead of the City Ground showdown, and he acknowledged that Forest must now be taken seriously as genuine contenders for the Premier League title.

The Liverpool head coach declared (via TNT Sports): “I have always said you can judge the table best halfway through the season. They are up there with the rest so they are definitely a team in competition with us and the others.

“If you look at the way they play and their results, then it is deserved. It is going to be a very difficult challenge for us to get a result.”

Slot has also revised his stance on Forest’s victory at Anfield in September, which was widely regarded as a shock result at the time but instead offered a sign of things to come from Nuno’s team this season.

The Reds boss said: “When Liverpool lose a home game, it’s something you don’t expect. For us to lose on that day was hard to take. Now, looking back and seeing where they are in the league, it is not such a shock result as it felt then.”

Liverpool surely won’t take Forest so lightly this time

After finishing 16th and 17th in their first two seasons back in the Premier League, for Forest to sit third at the halfway stage – having already surpassed their points totals from the past two campaigns – is a remarkable feat, and they’ve since proven that the win at Anfield four months ago was no freak result.

There haven’t been too many games this term where Liverpool went in as the side in inferior form, but the Reds’ slow start to 2025 means that the greater momentum is actually with the Garibaldi ahead of tomorrow’s fixture, which Joe Gomez and Darwin Nunez will miss through injury and suspension respectively.

Nuno’s team haven’t even conceded a goal for a month, with Jhon Duran the last player to score against them in mid-December, and they’re one of only two teams to achieve a clean sheet against Slot’s league leaders so far this season.

Maybe LFC took Forest a little too lightly when they last met in September, but there’s certainly no chance of that happening this time around.

A win for the Midlands outfit would represent a serious statement of intent in the Premier League title race, but conversely, victory for Liverpool would take them nine points ahead of their opponents with a game in hand – a gulf which’d be very difficult for the two-time European Cup winners to overcome.

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