Arne Slot expects Liverpool to be without Alisson Becker until the latter stages of the season as the goalkeeper recovers from injury.
Alisson missed the Champions League trip to Galatasaray with a training issue, briefly returned against Tottenham and in the second leg, but withdrew again before the Brighton game.
He will now miss upcoming fixtures against Manchester City in the FA Cup and Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League.
Slot added that Alexander Isak could feature against City, while Jeremie Frimpong and Mohamed Salah are also expected to be available.
Read Arne Slot’s injury-related updates at his pre-match press conference this morning below.
Alisson Becker
“He will not be part of the Paris Saint-Germain games as well. He will be out for a bit longer. Towards the end of the season we expect him to be fit again.”
Jeremie Frimpong
“He seems to be OK – trained with us yesterday fully and will train with us [today] again. But he was one of the players I referred to about the Brighton game, I think in the second half you could see that he still has a step to make in terms of [playing] every three days. And then coming off for the national team. Another interesting and difficult choice to make, how many minutes in which game. Because games come so fast and as we know, we don’t have eight right full-backs available. Interesting challenge but I faced this challenge throughout the whole season almost, so I will find an answer.”
Alexander Isak
“It will definitely be too fast to expect him in the starting line-up. He trained with us yesterday for the first time and today for the second time after exactly 101 days, I know this because it was told to me. So, it will take a bit of time to give him a lot of minutes. We will make sure we do the right thing in terms of building him up in minutes, but it’s a very good thing to have him on the training ground again. It would be even a better thing to have him available for games, that’s for sure.
“You can even be on the bench if you haven’t trained. But the question is: is he ready to play some minutes? That’s another question. It’s a difficult one, because we don’t play a normal game. What I mean is, it could go to extra-time, so that makes it even more complicated if you bring him in, if we think he can only play 10 minutes – if we already think this – and you bring him in 10 minutes before the end and then you go to extra-time… of course, you can take him off again if we have enough players available to bring another player in. So, yeah, maybe a few minutes but let’s wait and see how it is with him today, how he feels about it himself. It’s clear that after two training sessions, after 100 days, it would not make any sense to start him tomorrow.”
Mohamed Salah
“He is [fit]. He trained with us yesterday, he will train with us today and is available for the game tomorrow.”
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