Jurgen Klopp: Liverpool boss confirms three Covid-19 cases among players, without revealing their identities | Football News

Liverpool have recorded three new positive Covid-19 cases but manager Jurgen Klopp believes Sunday’s game at Chelsea is not yet close to being called off.

Klopp declined to name the trio as they were still awaiting PCR test confirmations but those affected, plus Thiago Alcantara and Takumi Minamino, will be missing at Stamford Bridge.

“Taki is running outside, Thiago not. On top of that we have three new Covid cases in the team and a few more in the staff so it’s not so cool in the moment,” said Klopp.

“I’m not able to say who it is but it’ll be pretty clear on the teamsheet the day after tomorrow.

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“We aren’t close to getting the game postponed yet. We haven’t had a proper outbreak yet but it’s happening more and more often.

“It’s like a lottery in the morning when you wait for the result. It was day-by-day pretty much another case and today another one.”

The match against title rivals Chelsea is a crucial one for Liverpool with leaders Manchester City threatening to pull away at the top of the table.

Liverpool’s second league defeat of the campaign at Leicester on Tuesday, coupled with City’s 1-0 win at Brentford in midweek means Klopp’s side trail the champions by nine points going into the New Year’s fixtures.

Klopp is giving up on the title just yet, however.

“The only chance to catch anybody who’s ahead of you is to win football games,” he added. “And that’s already now not so easy. We play against Chelsea, who have similar issues like we have. I’m not 100 per cent in the framework over what exactly the situation is at Chelsea but that’s probably the case.

“We go there and we try everything – it’s a tricky place to go anyway. You don’t win there with an average performance so we better be concerned about how good we can be to play the best football game.

“We can now talk about our last game which we were obviously not happy with. The Leicester game, even without us performing on our top level, we probably should have won the game if we would have put away our chances.

“Of course we have to show that we can do much better and that’s what we try now because we cannot catch City without playing good football.”