'Arne Slot has done what Jurgen Klopp never did with Liverpool's Luis Diaz' - UK media round-up

Liverpool has received plenty of praise in the opening months of the season and rightly so, considering the Reds are flying high on all fronts.

Arne Slot's men sit top of the Premier League, and moved to the top of the Champions League standings with a 4-0 win over Bayer Leverkusen that maintained their 100 percent start to the revamped competition.

Luis Diaz notched a hat-trick while Cody Gakpo also scored, with all of Liverpool's goals coming in the second half. Here, we've rounded up what sections of the UK media made of the win.

The Guardian, unsurprisingly, focussed on Liverpool's improved performance after the interval: "After a sterile first half, when Alonso’s tactics left Liverpool wondering who to press, the game and the hosts exploded into life after the break.

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"Luis Diaz was handed a rare start as a central striker and produced the first hat-trick of his Liverpool career. A thumping header from Cody Gakpo, two minutes after Díaz’s delightful opener, soon took the contest away from Leverkusen. They were dissected in the second half and a team that won the Bundesliga without losing a league game last season departed chastened.

"It was a harrowing return for Alonso, who endured the heaviest defeat of his managerial reign since losing 5-1 at Eintracht Frankfurt 10 days after taking the Leverkusen job in October 2022."

Meanwhile, The Athletic laid out the statistics behind Arne Slot's stunning start to life as Reds boss. The article said: "Arne Slot doesn’t have Alonso’s Liverpool backstory. Nor does the former Feyenoord coach have the box-office presence of his predecessor, Jurgen Klopp.

"Slot was by no means the 'sexy' or obvious choice for the job when he was proposed by Liverpool’s incoming sporting director Richard Hughes as the outstanding candidate to follow Klopp, but it is now 14 wins, one draw and just one defeat in 16 matches. Liverpool are top of the Premier League and now top of the Champions League standings. Beating the German champions 4-0 is another significant statement of intent."

The Times reserved praise for Curtis Jones, who delivered another classy performance in midfield: "It was a night when Jones, the homegrown talent who will hope to be named in the England squad tomorrow, was determined to drag those around him out of the humdrum. He accepted the challenge of trying to make the difference and it is that quality that will shape his prospects.

"Leverkusen were increasingly content to slow the game down, but paid for that lack of ambition when Jones spun deep to collect possession and found himself confronted by a packed defence. No matter, he threaded a pass that bypassed four white shirts and Diaz had timed his run to perfection. The impudent finish that followed, scooped over the bamboozled Lukas Hradecky, was a sheer delight."

And The Telegraph praised Slot's ingenuity for playing Luis Diaz as a central striker: "All hail the Arne Slot evolution and the continued rise of his Liverpool team of the tweak. If Jurgen Klopp was famed for his heavy metal football, Slot is all about the fine tuning. There have not been many radical policy shifts, but transforming Luis Diaz into a prolific goalscorer may be one of the most unexpected and progressive Slot moves yet.

"Utilising Diaz as a false nine against Bayer Leverkusen carried all the hallmarks of the kind of Slot positional experiment which is differentiating him from the previous manager... There was no indication from Slot that Diaz’s positional change will be anything more than a temporary response to circumstances. But it is a new option which will keep the opposition manager guessing. There was no chance Xabi Alonso could have imagined Diaz as a central striker. This is becoming a theme of Slot’s early work, seeing the multi-tasking potential of his players rather than limiting them to fixed roles."