Klopp confirms Liverpool duo to miss Watford trip

Ahead of Liverpool’s first game back from the international break, Jurgen Klopp confirmed two of his players won’t be available.

Alisson Becker and Fabinho will skip Liverpool’s trip to Watford on Saturday in favor of traveling directly to Spain from international duty.

The pair were part of the Brazil squad that defeated Uruguay 4-1 in a 2022 World Cup qualifier on Thursday. Fabinho had 71 minutes of action, while Alisson was an unused substitute. Therefore, with only 36 hours to prepare for the weekend, Klopp has elected to leave them out of his team.

The Liverpool boss has instead sanctioned for Alisson and Fabinho to travel to Spain ahead of Tuesday’s Champions League group stage clash with reigning La Liga title holders Atletico Madrid.

“I’m not [frustrated],” said Klopp at a pre-match conference on Friday afternoon.

“We have no chance, obviously; somebody decided to give Brazil the opportunity to play last night, so a few hours ago, and somebody made a decision that we have to play on Saturday at 12.30. It is all not in our hands.”

He added: “As you maybe know, Atletico is not playing at the weekend – our next opponent in the Champions League. Something like that would never happen here and if it would then it would be like, ‘Oh my god, how can they do it for them?’ and stuff like this.

“So, we’ve known it for a while, we made our decision a while ago, we had to sort quarantine issues and all these kind of things, so the decision we made is the boys will not be here – they will go directly to Madrid, wait there for us and then hopefully be able to play against Atletico.

“They will come back slightly later than us, 10 days [is] over then and then they can come back and are in our normal procedure again and that’s it.”