Slot's Lecture on Football Joy Rings Hollow as Liverpool Serve Up Tedium

Arne Slot lecturing the football world on joy? Pull the other one, mate.

The Liverpool manager has been waxing lyrical about the state of modern football, lamenting the suffocation of the beautiful game by set-piece obsession. "My football heart doesn't like it," he declared. "If you ask me about football, I think about the Barcelona team from 10, 15 years ago. Every Sunday evening you were hoping they would play. Now, most of the games I see in the Premier League are not for me a joy to watch."

Fair enough on the diagnosis – the Premier League's descent into set-piece theatre is indeed a genuine malady. Nobody wants to watch Reece James and Declan Rice's corner-kick mastery decide matches while their musclebound teammates stand about the box like extras on a late-night Channel 5 production. The game's become a repeatable, unpressurised skill competition rather than the flowing spectacle it should be. Set pieces have turned into a way to demean achievements – particularly Arsenal's title credentials – and frankly, Wenger's offside obsession would've been a better solution than what we're currently enduring.

But here's the rub: Slot preaching about football's vanishing joy whilst his Liverpool side has served up perhaps their dullest campaign since Roy Hodgson's brief, forgettable spell at Anfield 15 years ago? The hypocrisy is almost too much to stomach.

This is a manager who throttled the throttle when Liverpool were comfortable ahead in their title-winning season, then essentially abandoned attacking football altogether when the second campaign went pear-shaped. His side has produced a string of life-draining matches this term – the tedious victory over Nottingham Forest, the unwatchable 0-0 stalemate with Arsenal, and various other exercises in footballing numbness.

"I just wouldn't be surprised if you went to watch a Sunday League match now and the 16-year-olds were completely focused on set-pieces," Slot added, sounding like an Italian grandmother bristling at the sight of shop-bought pasta whilst hand-rolling her dough in a family Milanese restaurant. Except she'd probably do a better job integrating a £100m creative talent into the team.

Slot's pontificating might have carried more weight had it arrived after a sparkling 5-2 demolition of West Ham rather than following his side's grinding, fortunate scrapes against lesser opponents. He's transformed Liverpool from heavy-metal football into something altogether more pedestrian – an indie band now peddling a dreary country-and-western album in a desperate attempt to stay relevant after early success. He's hardly the authority on bringing joy back to football.