Arne Slot has delivered a positive injury report on Milos Kerkez while confirming return timelines for Conor Bradley and Jeremie Frimpong following Liverpool’s win over West Ham.
Liverpool secured a 2-0 Premier League victory over West Ham United at the London Stadium this weekend, with Alexander Isak and Cody Gakpo scoring, pushing the team back into the top half of the table. Despite the busy festive schedule ahead, manager Arne Slot faces relatively few injury issues.
According to a report from Liverpool.com, both right-backs Conor Bradley and Jeremie Frimpong are expected to return to action “potentially a couple of weeks from now.”
Slot had previously indicated they would be sidelined for “around three weeks,” meaning they have just over one week left of that period.
Goalkeeper Alisson Becker returned from a midweek illness to start against West Ham, and Hugo Ekitike came off the bench after recovering from a minor back issue picked up against PSV in the Champions League.
Slot also confirmed that Milos Kerkez was substituted only due to cramp, not injury, following the West Ham win. The boss explained the issue with a quote: “I have emphasized a lot of times the fact that some players need to adapt to three games a week.
Maybe it is not a surprise that Milos has cramp in the end for two reasons: he is not completely used to that and, second of all, because he puts so much effort in every single time he plays.”
The only long-term casualty is Giovanni Leoni, the 18-year-old center-back who “could miss the remainder of the season with an ACL injury” sustained against Southampton in the League Cup.
Reflecting on the match, Slot highlighted a positive change in the team’s luck:
“The good thing was that today for the first time in many, many, many games [that] the first chance of the opponent didn’t go in as well. The best thing was that it was their only chance and that was after 90 minutes.
This happened so many times to us that the first chance the other team gets goes in and then you get a completely different game, as we’ve seen so many times.”