Liverpool have struggled to cope without their starting centre-back duo this season, with Jurgen Klopp rueing his side’s poor luck with injuries, as reported by the Echo.
With Joel Matip set to join Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez on the sidelines, at the very least temporarily, the club is scrambling to find a stop-gap solution at the back.
“To play your best season you need to be lucky. You need luck with injuries. For us the situation is like this,” the former Dortmund coach said. “We are not lucky in these moments but still everyone expects us to play our best season. That’s okay, but we also have to find the solution to win the next football game and make the season as special as possible. That is what we try to do.”
Considering the prior outing against Jose Mourinho’s Tottenham, with Jordan Henderson and Nathaniel Phillips posting solid performances in defence, we’d be hard-pressed to deny Liverpool’s lack of luck in that department.
In an unprecedent season, few could have predicted that Klopp would have been left with a midfielder-turned-defender and an injury prone centre-half for the remainder of the season as early as November.
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It’s a scenario beyond the club hierarchy’s wildest imaginations, with the Reds gambling that our options going into the new term would be enough to see us through until the summer.
The reality of our current situation, however, is that we sit on the very precipice of change – failing to bring in a stop-gap solution could, as some fear, derail our season.
Klopp’s right to point out our lack of luck this season, so we could more than do with creating some of our own, and what better place to start than by arranging defensive reinforcements?