Jurgen Klopp confirmed three Covid-19 infections among Liverpool players, but did not disclose their identities.

Three more cases have been discovered during testing. The number of Covid-19 infections among Liverpool players is not high enough to warrant a postponement of the Chelsea match, according to Jurgen Klopp.

Liverpool have three fresh positive Covid-19 cases, but Jurgen Klopp feels the game against Chelsea on Sunday is not currently under risk of postponement.

Klopp refused to name the three because PCR test results were still pending, but those afflicted, as well as Thiago Alcantara and Takumi Minamino, will be absent at Stamford Bridge.

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

With Manchester City pulling away at the top of the premier league, Liverpool’s match versus rivals Chelsea can’t be more important. Liverpool’s 2nd league defeat of the season against Leicester, coupled with Manchester City’s 1-0 victory at Brentford in midweek, has left Klopp’s side 9 points behind the leaders heading into the New Year’s matches. Klopp, on the other hand, isn’t ready to give up the title just yet.

“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.”

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