How will the Club World Cup affect LFC’s domestic schedule?

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Liverpool have confirmed that their Premier League trip to West Ham has been postponed owing to their Club World Cup commitments.

But what might our revised schedule look like?

Our final game before we head off to Qatar for the tournament, for which we qualified by winning the Champions League, is a home match against Watford on December 14.

We qualify automatically for one of the semifinals on December 18.

The final comes three days later, coinciding with what would have been a visit to the London Stadium.

That game will then be placed in a midweek slot later in the season.

Chelsea, the last English side to participate in the competition in December 2012, played their game-in-hand in mid-January.

For us, it could potentially be set for January 7/8, following the FA Cup Third Round weekend and preceding Manchester United’s visit to Anfield.

Alternatively, we could play it on February 4/5, between Southampton at home and Norwich away. That would, however, mean playing them twice in the same competition in the space of three matches. The FA might want to avoid such a situation.

It might, then, be pushed further down the line.

Playing it shortly after the turn of the year would only intensify an already frantic succession of fixtures, but leaving us out of sync with our rivals well into the spring could unfavourably alter the balance of the title race.

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