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A former Premier League referee said he "cannot understand" why Crystal Palace was not awarded a penalty when the ball struck Alexis Mac Allister's hand at Wembley on Sunday.
Liverpool midfielder Mac Allister was jumping to try and head a cross away during the second half but did not jump high enough, and after the ball traveled over his head, it hit his hand. The incident was checked by the video assistant referee, but it was deemed that no further action was required, and the game continued with a Palace corner.
Ex-ref Keith Hackett, though, believes that Palace should have been awarded a penalty. "[Alexis] Mac Allister clearly handled the ball. The movement of the hand was towards the ball, therefore that's an offence, and that should be a penalty kick.
"I cannot understand why VAR did not come to the rescue of Chris Kavanagh and award Crystal Palace a penalty kick."
As it turned out, the decision did not impact the final outcome of the game as Palace went on to win anyway, claiming victory in the season's traditional curtain-raiser via a penalty shoot-out.
Liverpool led twice, through Hugo Ekitike and Jeremie Frimpong, but was pegged back on both occasions by Jean-Philippe Mateta and Ismaila Sarr respectively.
Virgil van Dijk was culpable for both of Palace's goals on an off day for the Liverpool captain, and while Slot — unsurprisingly — did not single out individual players for their performances in the game, he made it clear that he was not happy with the defending on show from his team.
"I think in the whole pre-season we saw that we are able to create more and we are more comfortable on the ball, we create more opportunities, chances, we dominate maybe even more," Slot said.
"Last season we had a lot of ball possession but that didn’t always lead to promising situations. Now, we are better in creating and getting promising situations than we were, in my opinion, throughout the whole of last season.
"But the other side is also true, that we have conceded four against Milan, one against the Japanese team [Yokohama F. Marinos], two against [Athletic Club] Bilbao and again two today.
"What made us really strong last season was we only won mostly by a margin of one goal and that had mostly to do with us keeping a clean sheet or as a maximum conceding one goal.
"Today we scored twice against Palace, last season we were not able to do that once – we beat them 1-0 and we had a 1-1 draw at Anfield. That’s the positive.
"But conceding two; against a good team, by the way, that has made it really difficult for everyone last season and I’m expecting them [to] this season again.
"A lot of balls passed into our last line and a lot of crosses. For me, I felt that we didn’t give away that many chances until they scored the 2-2 and then they were threatening us more."
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