Ibrahima Konate breaking his personal record for consecutive appearances this season is no fluke, with Arne Slot impressed with how he’s “bought into” his plan.
Konate is set to start in Sunday’s Premier League clash with Southampton and in doing so will extend his record of consecutive league starts to 11.
His previous best was eight games in a row, having seen his previous three seasons with Liverpool blighted by persistent injuries.
Now only Virgil van Dijk, Ryan Gravenberch and Mohamed Salah have clocked more minutes on the pitch for Slot’s side and the head coach has praised his No. 5 for buying into his fitness regime.
“First of all it’s always about the player, how much effort he puts in to stay fit,” Slot told reporters on Friday.
“And then second of all you’ve got a performance staff and a technical staff to do the best possible thing for him to keep him fit.
“If the player doesn’t buy in himself, it’s almost impossible for us to keep him fit.
“But 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 not only him but a lot of players.”
Of course, Konate is not only starting consistently, he is also performing to a remarkably high standard – arguably above centre-back partner Van Dijk in many games, as one of Liverpool’s players of the season so far.
That comes despite Jarell Quansah starting over him in the opening game of the campaign at Ipswich, before being replaced by Konate in a fairly brutal half-time change.
As Slot went on to explain, Konate’s elite-level form is largely down to his commitment to a new setup with considerably more tactical meetings than under Jurgen Klopp.
“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 in the moment,” Slot said.
“But to be fair to him he came back, like so many others, quite late because of the [Euros]. We were already training for a few weeks.
“Jarell did really well in pre-season, so I thought it was, in my opinion, a logical decision to play Jarell.
“Then at half-time I made the decision that we needed Ibou and he went from the United game – which was his first one after 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 – [to that].
“He not only bought into getting fit and doing everything for us, but every time we had a meeting I could just see that he wanted to learn, wanted to listen and wanted to improve.
“That’s what he did in my opinion. That’s why his improvement compared to the first game he played in pre-season until the first game he played at Ipswich was already a massive difference.”
Konate is still only 25 and is now in the conversation to take over as permanent France captain if Kylian Mbappe relinquishes the armband.
Now indispensable for club and country, it is a marker of how he has bought into Slot’s methods – and fortunately, with talks over a new contract expected to be a formality, that should continue long into the future.
