ARNE SLOT has taken the Premier League by storm in his debut season as Liverpool manager.
The Dutchman, 46, looks on course to win the title – just the Reds’ second in the Prem era – ahead of Arsenal.
But this is not the first time he has caused a stir and sent shockwaves around football with his tactical revolution.
Although, his never-seen-before-or-since idea from 2011 did not quite have the same success.
In fact, it was branded “een briljante mislukking” – “a brilliant failure”.
Because what Slot did was utterly baffling.
Playing as a midfielder for PEC Zwolle in the Dutch second tier, he got permission from his coaches to try something new in an attempt to bamboozle the opposition.
He certainly did that – and no doubt his own team-mates and fans, too.
Playmaker Slot took kick-off with Joey van den Berg, flicked the ball up and then booted it as high as possible into the air in barely believable scenes.
The original idea was to try and kick the ball high into the opposition half – even into the penalty area – and for Slot’s Zwolle team-mates to chase it down and cause chaos in the hope of taking advantage of the defence’s confusion and scoring.
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The idea was done in training – and to good enough effect to give the experiment a go in a match.
But when it came to the crunch moment, Slot got the kick all wrong as he sent the football almost directly vertically upwards – actually slightly backwards – rather than towards the goal.
It bounced in his own half just inside the centre circle between a bunch of very confused footballers amid ironic cheers from the crowd – while the commentator described the unfathomable start to the match as “extraordinarily strange”.
Slot’s embarrassing blunder is still remembered fondly in Dutch football, regularly shown on TV and those involved can’t help but laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it all.
Slot’s manager at the time, Art Langeler, told the De Stentor newspaper: “By firing the ball as high as possible into the penalty area, the idea was our three strikers would run forward and be there (for when it dropped) on the edge of the area. And who knows what would come of that?
“[We tried it in training] three times even. That’s why [assistant] Jaap Stam and I said to each other, ‘Let’s try it’.
‘MADE HIMSELF LOOK RIDICULOUS’
“But it needed the right execution, of course.
“It looked funny. And if you didn’t know the background, you’d think, ‘What on earth are they doing? They just shoot the ball into the air.’
“No, this was a brilliant failure, let’s leave it at that.”
Another Zwolle coach Jan Everse added to The Athletic: “It was still a ridiculous idea. Arne has a lot of ideas — this, unfortunately, was one of his worst ones.
“The kick was not what he wanted. He got it totally wrong.
“He made himself look ridiculous — it was unbelievable.”
Incredibly, Slot was determined to try the tactic again and did so later the same year – again against Cambuur – and again it went horribly wrong.
Safe to say, we won’t expect the likes of Mo Salah or Dominik Szoboszlai to introduce the hoof-it-really-high-in-the-air-and-hope-it-causes-chaos play in the Premier League anytime soon…
