And it won’t just be fans back at Anfield that Liverpool will have to look forward to, it’ll also be players – notably Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez, Joel Matip and Jordan Henderson – who’ll be back from long-term injury.
Still, what the absence of these players did show is that Liverpool’s squad is not as strong as its rivals and that certain players – Matip, Naby Keita and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain – are somewhat injury prone and cannot be relied on to step into the breach for long periods when others can’t make the first team.
Indeed, when Keita was fit and selected, he did nothing to suggest that manager Jurgen Klopp should persevere with him. The same could be said of Oxlade-Chamberlain, though his superb strike against Burnley in the penultimate match of the season, reminded us all of what he can do and may well have saved his Liverpool career for the time being.
Keita, along with Divock Origi and Xherdan Shaqiri, may find themselves surplus to requirements. The same is probably true of Nat Phillips, who despite his stalwart performances in the last third of the season at centre-back, will still find himself behind van Dijk, Matip, Gomez and the newly signed from RB Leipzig French under-21 international, Ibrahima Konate, in the queue to play at the heart of the Reds’ defence.
Having shown that he is more than a Championship defender, one would imagine that Phillips himself would not want to be Liverpool’s fifth choice centre back and would prefer to be somewhere where he would be playing every week.
Indeed, the heroic Phillips has already been linked with Burnley, but this might just be newspapers trying to put two and two together in a narrative that has Phillips as an old-school centre half linking up with a manager, Sean Dyche, an old-school centre half himself who has built his successful Burnley team on these virtues. We’ll see about this, particularly when we consider that Dyche has been linked with the manager’s job at Crystal Palace – Dyche was a former Eagles’ player. Perhaps Phillips will end up at Palace and not Burnley. What is certain is that Ozan Kabak, who came to Liverpool on loan from Schalke in January will not see the Reds exercise their option to buy him. The Frenchman Konate was seen as the better player and better value for money.
Another player likely to leave Liverpool, having not made the grade, is Takumi Minamino. The Japanese has been on loan with Southampton since January and rumours abound that the south coast club will make an offer to Liverpool for the striker and that Liverpool will be inclined to accept. What this means is that Liverpool will be in the market for at least one forward.
Diogo Jota – another player to have suffered an injury-interrupted season – showed some spectacular form and he will seriously challenge Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mané for a starting place up front. Firmino’s goal scoring form in the last year has faltered and his place is perhaps most at risk from Jota. So, with Origi and Minamino set to depart and the form of Firmino and, to a lesser extent, Mané, showing decline, then it would not be unreasonable – financial constraints notwithstanding – to expect the Reds to enter the transfer market, not to buy a prospect but a forward ready to challenge for a starting spot.
