Liverpool Players Likely To Be Available For Carabao Cup Clash With Southampton
Liverpool make a short trip to Southampton to continue their defence of the Carabao Cup on Wednesday night at St Mary's. The Reds are heavy favourites heading into the quarterfinal clash against managerless Saints.
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Liverpool won last season's competition with a dramatic Wembley final win over Chelsea - Jurgen Klopp's final trophy for the club before his departure in the summer. Southampton are in crisis as they sit bottom of the Premier League and nine points adrift of safety.
They suffered a humiliating 5-0 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday, resulting in the sacking of manager Russell Martin while Liverpool played out a 2-2 draw with Fulham at Anfield.
Arne Slot's side have picked up just two points in their last two Premier League games, seeing their lead at the top cut to two points by Chelsea as a result, and the injury situation continue to pile up.
The Dutchman will have to be creative with his backline for Liverpool's Carabao Cup quarter-final at Southampton. Andy Robertson will miss the game due to suspension following his sending-off against Fulham, while Conor Bradley and Ibrahima Konate remain unavailable due to injury.
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Kostas Tsimikas, who has missed the last six matches returned to full training on Tuesday but he is unlikely to start for the Reds. Diogo Jota came off the bench to score in Saturday's 2-2 draw with Fulham but will not be considered to start at St Mary's.
Slot said at his pre-match press conference: "It's going to be a game where not all of our starters will start, so we have to manage minutes.
"If we want to use a few starters not for 90 minutes, we have to balance. I can only make five substitutions. So the ones that make minutes and go off maybe at half-time can't be more than five because you can only make five substitutions."
The Dutchman added: "I am aware of the fact that we have only four defenders available and probably the ones that have started a lot of times will not play 90 minutes for sure and maybe not even at all.
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"So, it's going to be either Academy players that are going to get playing time or it's going to be players that nobody would expect to see in the last line that are going to play in the last line tomorrow."
Goalkeepers
Caoimhin Kelleher, Vítězslav Jaroš, Harvey Davies
Defenders
Virgil Van Dijk, Joe Gomez, Jarell Quansah, Amara Nallo, Trent Alexander-Arnold, James Norris
Midfielders
Ryan Gravenberch, Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister, Curtis Jones, Wataru Endo, Harvey Elliott, James McConnell, Trey Nyoni, Tyler Morton
Forwards
Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz, Cody Gakpo, Darwin Nunez, Diogo Jota, Federico Chiesa, Jayden Danns
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LFC Transfer Room Football Correspondent. Covered the fortunes of Liverpool for the past three years. Follow Joseph on X (formerly Twitter) @joseph_agbobli