Three Liverpool Players Test Positive For COVID-19 Ahead Of The Match Against Chelsea

JAKARTA - Juergen Klopp has revealed that three Liverpool players have tested positive for COVID-19 ahead of the Premier League match against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge, Sunday, January 2.

Klopp did not mention in detail the names of the players who tested positive for COVID-19, but he likened the current situation to a lottery for Liverpool and most English teams.

"We have three new cases of COVID-19 in the team and a few more among the staff, not a pleasant situation," he said.

"I can't reveal the name because there are still some procedural things like PCR tests and so on, but you can definitely see the difference in the list of players involved tomorrow," Klopp added.

However, Klopp feels the situation of the surge in Covid-19 cases at Liverpool has not reached the stage where the match against Chelsea must be suspended.

"Not yet, but we don't know later. We've never had a spike of 10, 15 or 20 players immediately positive, more to one day one," said Klopp.

"While on the staff it's more frequent, so it feels like I said before, it's like a lottery and every morning you have to queue to find out the results. Later every day it increases by one, like today," he added.

On the other hand, Klopp also confirmed that Takumi Minamino and Thiago Alcantara will not be involved in the match against Chelsea because they are both still entangled with muscle problems.

"Taki may be close to recovering, because he can already run outdoors. But Thiago hasn't, maybe longer. He has a hip problem that we don't know where it came from," concluded Klopp.

Liverpool will try to get up against Chelsea after losing to Leicester City in the middle of last week.

The defeat saw Liverpool evicted Chelsea from second place in the standings, with a distance of one point behind but have one game to spare.