Injury Update: Keita, Shaqiri (and Salah)

The boss weighs in on everyone’s ability to actually play
games.

Do we even need players if we manage to beat Leicester
City 3-0 with a (seemingly) decimated squad? Yes. The answer is
yes. And luckily enough, the boss had some updates this weekend on
some of the many, many, many injured players.

It’s probably cheating to start with a player who was injured in
the middle of this weekend’s game, but if life were fair we
wouldn’t need to write injury reports. Naby Keita suffered yet
another injury in the second half against Leicester City, which is probably not all that
surprising given how on-and-off his time on the pitch has been
since September.

“He felt his hamstring and was not able to play on, otherwise he
would have stayed on the pitch,” Klopp said during the post-match
conference. Keita’s injury will be assessed by the club’s medical
team in the coming days. Fingers crossed it’s minor and he can
slowly return to playing a full 90 minutes without succumbing to
further injuries.

Speaking of players who haven’t seen a full 90 minutes in a
while, Xherdan Shaqiri picked up a muscle injury
during international duty and it was only discovered when he
returned to Liverpool.

“Shaq, how I know it, he had a muscle injury with the national
team which he didn’t really realise,” Klopp said. “Now he trained
with us, we gave him a day off and then he came back and was
involved in the session, but was not fully involved and all these
kind of things. He just did a little bit, after that he felt a
little bit. Then we did a scan and they found he has an injury from
five or six days ago.

“Nobody knew about that, not even Shaq knew about it, but that’s
how things sometimes are and so he was not able to be involved
[against Leicester City].”

And then there’s Mo Salah who tested negative for COVID on Sunday, a sure
sign that things are looking up for Liverpool. Hopefully we’ll hear
a few more updates on all the other players we’re waiting on soon
and maybe—just maybe—this chaotic and utterly bizarre season will
return to some semblance of normalcy.