“That ultimately cost us, Huge frustration for us” – Steve Cooper blames Nottingham Forest loss to Liverpool on one thing

Head coach Steve Cooper was left frustrated by Nottingham Forest’s defending at set-pieces as they were beaten 3-2 by Liverpool at Anfield.

The Reds had twice hit back after going behind, with Neco Williams and Morgan Gibbs-White cancelling out goals from Diogo Jota. But set-pieces had caused them problems all afternoon, and that defensive sloppiness proved to be costly.

No sooner had the visitors brought it back to 2-2 than Mo Salah netted what proved to be the winner just three minutes later. Forest still had a couple of chances to level again and showed no shortage of fight, but they have now gone 11 games without a win.

“The result and the stats of conceding three add to the negative run that we’re on. If you look at the game in isolation, the huge frustration for us is that we’ve conceded three goals from set-pieces and that ultimately cost us,” Cooper said.

“Once the set-pieces were given away, the goals were really avoidable. We could have cleared the first one simply with the first contact. And the second one, we’ve just not marked properly, in terms of runners getting in the box.

“That is the real frustration. It was always going to be an incredibly tough game, so to think we’ve minimised Liverpool to not many open-play chances, to score two, to hit the bar and to get into some positions where we should do better with final passes, that all tells me we did some really decent things in the game.

“But you can’t come away from the fact we’ve lost. That is the be-all and end-all.”