Injury Update: Keita, Shaqiri (and Salah)

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.