Speaking in his latest press conference ahead of this weekend’s fight against bottom of the league Southampton, Slot touched upon Konate who has forged a great partnership with Virgil van Dijk this season.
“First of all, it’s always about the player (and) how much effort does he put in to stay fit. Then second of all you’ve got the performance staff and technical staff to do the best possible thing for him to keep him fit. But if the player doesn’t buy in himself, it’s almost impossible for us to keep him fit. We have our ideas about how to keep a player fit and he bought into that, so until now that has gone really well for him (and) a lot of players.
“The first game he didn’t play and there was a reason for that because if you look back at our pre-season games they weren’t his best games at the moment. But to be fair to him, he came back, like so many others, quite late because of the tournament.”
The Dutchman revealed that even with Jarell Quansah having a fantastic preseason he could not keep Konate on the bench.
“We were already training for a few weeks and Jarell (Quansah) did really well in pre-season so I thought it was in my opinion a logical decision to play Jarell. At half-time (against Ipswich) I think I made the decision that we needed Ibou and (that’s) the reason why we were from the United game, which was his first one after him not playing for a long time, because he didn’t play at the Euros and in the end phase of the season he didn’t play for Liverpool as well.
“He not only bought in to getting fit and doing everything for this, but every time we had a meeting with him it was, I would maybe not do justice to all of the players, but he was the one that I could see that he wanted to learn and wanted to listen and wanted to improve. That’s what he did in my opinion and that’s why his improvement compared to the first game he played in pre-season until the first game he played in Ipswich was already a massive difference.”
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