Jürgen Klopp: I've made no decisions on my Europa final line-up
Jürgen Klopp insists there is still an opportunity for members of his squad to play their way into his Europa League final starting line-up thoughts.
Before turning attentions to the Basel final against Sevilla next week, Liverpool will contest their final two Barclays Premier League fixtures of the campaign at home to Chelsea on Wednesday and at West Bromwich Albion this Sunday.
Klopp is adamant with those matches still remaining, he’s paid no mind to a potential team for the final and will assess his squad following the conclusion of the game at the Hawthorns before starting to make decisions.
The manager said: “Of course there are places available. Who knows who is going to be in the line-up next Wednesday? I have no idea.
“Hopefully we will have more players coming back and then we will have a really difficult choice to make. But I haven’t thought for one second yet about the line-up for Sevilla.
“You cannot say ‘we will hold players back for the final’. We have to take what we can get from our last two league games and then we will see.
“Not one of the players who were rested on Sunday because of the intensity of Thursday night were like: ‘Yes! How cool is this? Let me stay at home’.
“Instead they were like: ‘What? Why me? They all wanted to play’. Lallana, Emre, Dejan… all these guys. That’s a good situation.
“I don’t want to create a pressure and say ‘come on, show me you are ready for the final'.
“We will just see how things are over the coming days, how everyone is, and then we will make a decision for Chelsea, then for West Brom and then hopefully with the whole squad together for the final.”
Meanwhile, Klopp explained his thinking behind the decision to give Philippe Coutinho an hour of game-time against Watford on Sunday.
The Brazil playmaker was one of only three players – alongside Simon Mignolet and Alberto Moreno – to retain a place in the starting XI from the victory over Villarreal three days earlier.
“Phil started on Sunday because we thought about the general situation with injuries and how it was in the previous games,” Klopp said.
“Philippe only played 45 minutes at Swansea. It wasn’t a difficult decision. At the moment Phil looks very good. He’s in very good shape.
“He’s a very important player for us. We don’t think about risk, we just need to play football.
“If I thought about risk then we would leave everyone at home and put out a line-up with I don’t know who. That’s not how it works.
“We are really serious people and we think a lot about what we do. In this case it was clear that Philippe maximum 60 minutes and Roberto [Firmino] 30 minutes.
“I am really happy that we could do it like this. That we didn’t need to change anything earlier and that we could then give a boy like Cameron Brannagan an opportunity to play his second Premier League game.
“I couldn’t have been happier about this. It was really deserved. Cam - what a boy! It was nice to be able to give him those minutes.”