Goals from Mohamed Salah and Dominik Szoboszlai in the opening half ensured an impressive performance was rewarded with a first league victory at the Etihad since Jürgen Klopp’s maiden visit as Reds boss back in November 2015.

Slot’s team – who have played one game more than second-placed Arsenal – remain unbeaten away from home in the top flight this season, while Salah’s 30th strike of an incredible campaign moved him level with Gordon Hodgson in third place in the club’s all-time top scorers list with 241 goals.

Read every word from Slot’s post-match press conference below.

If you play away at the Etihad, if you win there it is always a big win, no matter what the league table looks like. If you play away from home against a Pep [Guardiola] team it is almost impossible to have more ball possession than his team has. We knew we had to defend a lot and that’s what we did really well and then some good moments in the counter-attack led to us winning the game.

The fans can sing whatever they want, I think they’ve sung it for quite long already, but we know as a team how hard we have to work for every single win. It was only three days ago, somebody asked me if we’d had a dip on Wednesday. I don’t believe that as well as I am calm now about this win.

You can ask every single question you want, but I have said many times it is so hard to judge the league table before every single game is played because the person that asks me this asked me this after the [Aston] Villa game. In my opinion, Villa away and City away are two very, very, very difficult games so you can drop points over there. For example, Arsenal already played those two games, so it is hard to judge it but we are in a good position, but we also know how hard it was for us to win against Wolves.

Now we play against Newcastle [United] and we played a 3-3 over there which was, in my opinion, also a good result, although after 89 minutes we were 3-2 up, but we also experienced how difficult that one is. In every other league, I think a lead like this would be very comfortable – except for this one because in this league every single game gives you a lot of challenges, even Plymouth Argyle gave us a lot of challenges.

No because you never think like that. If you start somewhere, you don’t think about where you are in terms of points at the end of the season. What we do know is that no-one saw us as a title contender when we started at the beginning of the season – and I think no-one in the world of football would have expected City not to be so close to the one that leads the league, if they are not the one that leads the league. We all know why, they had many injuries, they had a difficult period, but again today you could see – although the result maybe doesn’t show you that – how good they are as a team and how difficult they are to play against.

I said many times already, I always felt we had a lot of quality. That’s why, except for Federico Chiesa, we didn’t bring another player in. I was curious to know, two years ago Liverpool played Champions League and wanted to compete for the league. That was difficult and then they ended up sixth. Last season, they were Europa League if I am correct, so they mostly rested their players then and they could play at the weekend and they were competing until five, six, seven, eight games before the end.

So, what I was curious about was can we do both, what this club has done, what Jürgen has done, for so many years. Until now, we are doing quite a good job in both competitions, but we also have quite a difficult draw in the Champions League.

He has done his work very, very, very well and you don’t always see the result of that during games because many times we were close to scoring. I always say, people might not know it over here yet, but if you go to Holland then people say, ‘There he is again about his set-pieces.’ But if you want to win a big game then you need to have a neutral balance in set-pieces or a positive one. So, if we go to Villa away and they score [from a set-piece] and we don’t, it is so hard to win against a Villa or a Chelsea or an Arsenal.

And today it was the opposite: we scored from a set-piece and that gives you such a boost for this game because, at that moment of time, it wasn’t that we were dominating the game. It wasn’t expected that we could score at any second, so yeah, set-pieces are vital. We started with a new group of people this season and we need to give them a bit of time because I think – that’s also what you see at Arsenal, when they started working it wasn’t immediate, it takes a bit of time before you see the result – and that’s what we’re hoping for in the upcoming 11 [games] as well.

That’s been asked many times and it is difficult. I think the numbers speak for themselves. What pleased me most today is that mostly we have – in every game apart from this one I think, and maybe the home game against City or Chelsea – more ball possession so that means we bring him many, many, many times in promising positions.

But today there wasn’t that many moments we could bring him in promising positions, but these seven, eight, nine or 10 moments that we gave him the ball in those positions he was every time a threat and that probably tells you even more the quality player he is, because it’s not so easy for an attacker if he has to defend, defend, defend. And then he gets the ball and does something special, that’s sometimes difficult but at the moment not many things seem difficult for Mo.

On how much the spirit within the dressing room has driven Liverpool this season…

If you ask, I would hope that if the ones that are maybe the ones who haven’t won it [the title] yet that they would want to win something this season as well [as previous champions such as Salah]. And looking at them, how hard they work, I think all of them want to achieve something this season. But we know how hard it is, this league has always gone until the end – except I think for one season when Liverpool won it, there was a 25-point gap. In all the other seasons it was so close, if it was Liverpool or later on it was Arsenal together with City. So, the boys have worked every single day really hard to be where they are now and I hope and assume that they will keep doing that for three more months and let’s see where we are then.

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This article has been automatically translated and, while all reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, some errors in translation are possible. Please refer to the original English-language version of the article for the official version.