Jurgen Klopp will take his Liverpool side to face Nottingham Forest in the Premier League on Saturday.
While the boss’ availability for the game remains up in the air as a result of his FA charge for confronting an official against Manchester City, Klopp spoke to the media to offer some insight into the game.
Here are the best bits of his conference.
Will you be on the touchline?
“At this moment, I expect to be on the bench, but I don’t know 100%. It’s a normal process. We’re not too used to it but we have enough people who are and we’ve done everything we need to do.”
Naby’s back in training, is Saturday too soon for him to return?
“Yes! We can’t rush it. It was a tough injury, a serious injury. He’s only in parts of training. From Monday, if everything goes as planned, Naby and Ibou [Ibrahima Konate] will be involved in full team training. From there, we count days, but his ‘pre-season’, if you want, starts then.
“He was really out for a while, like Ox [Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain]. Ox was on the bench, I don’t think ready to play but he’s closer, one or two weeks ahead of Naby.”
When can we expect to see him back? After the World Cup?
“No, no. Before. It’s not a pre-season like five or six weeks. What we can do in rehab with these tough muscle injuries is everything but team training. You can’t replace team training. They do football work, they run more than we do in training sessions because they have to, but nothing in rehab can replace a football session. It’s a completely different intensity.
“That’s why I say the football part of his pre-season starts. Physically, he can probably run a marathon when he starts, but that’s not helpful because he needs to do other movements. As long as we can give the boys time to recover fully and get as fit as possible, we always try to do that.”
Any other new injures?
“No injuries or comebacks, no. No injuries but two tough games in shot succession and now another one coming up, so we need a close look at who can start. It’s really close, we only have the session this afternoon, yesterday was recovery.”
How positive is it to have Curtis Jones available again?
“It was a tough [year] for Curtis. Some freak injuries, a finger in the eye… stuff like this. This one, nobody knew where it was coming from. A stress reaction, this kind of thing. But with young players, these kinds of things happen. We’re still growing, Curtis obviously.
“It’s perfect to have him back. He’s an exceptional player, exceptional talent. Whatever system you play him in, he can play different positions which is very important. So it was very important for him to get the game time.”
You said Darwin Nunez had a slight muscle issue after the West Ham game…
“He’s one we have to check. He had treatment yesterday, I didn’t see a lot of him. I’ll get told later.”
This recent run of results has come from almost a 4-4-2, what has the change done?
“Closing gaps we left open in the weeks before. Not on purpose, it just happened. We played a specific system for a long time, and when you get used to things, you lose a bit of the desire for the detail.
“Because it was so well-tuned, how we defended and pressed, little things can change a lot, and that’s why we had to change a big thing – to start thinking new about it as a group.
“It’s actually not a big difference. It’s a change of responsibility slightly. It has given us more stability in different moments. It all depends on who is available or who is fit. When we started the 4-4-2, we had two more strikers available. That feels like a long time ago but it was only ten days ago that we had two more. We have to stay open for all possibilities.”
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