Liverpool’s understudies have been a title challenge trump card but Diogo Jota’s return adds new dimension
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Arne Slot has real injury issues in defence - but his attack has just been granted a big boost in numbers. There is a club in the north-west, recent champions of both England and Europe, who have famously been riven by injuries this season. It isn’t Liverpool. Not because their squad has remained fully fit but because, as Arne Slot has noted more than once, “nobody spoke about it”.
And if that isn’t strictly true, Liverpool’s injury problems have been camouflaged by results. It is harder to argue they are a problem when they are unbeaten in 19 games and boast the Champions League’s only 100 percent record. Or, indeed, when understudies have delivered the displays Caoimhin Kelleher and Conor Bradley did against Real Madrid.
But Liverpool have been short. They only had six outfield substitutes for Tuesday’s Champions League win at Girona, one of whom, James Norris, has played a mere nine minutes of first-team football for the club. Slot has only had five defenders for his four spots at the back and four attackers for places in his front three of late. His back-up midfielders for Saturday’s 2-2 draw with Fulham, Wataru Endo and Harvey Elliott, excelled for Jurgen Klopp last season but are yet to start a league or European game for the new head coach.
Yet on a day when his options narrowed further for Wednesday’s Carabao Cup tie at Southampton, Andy Robertson’s red card bringing a ban, meaning Ryan Gravenberch spent much of the Fulham game as a makeshift centre-back and leaving Virgil van Dijk musing that “maybe the manager has to be creative” in midweek, they expanded in another respect.
