Jurgen Klopp brings his Liverpool team to France today for a final training camp ahead of the new season.
The Reds lost 3-0 to Napoli on Sunday evening, their third defeat of the summer so far. However, today they welcome back Alisson Becker, Roberto Firmino and Mohamed Salah from their holidays.
Xherdan Shaqiri and Naby Keita will also travel to Evian with the squad as they continue their road back from recent injuries.
Liverpool face Manchester City next Sunday in the season’s curtain-raiser at Wembley. Before that, they play Lyon in Switzerland on Wednesday night in the final friendly of the summer.
Speaking at his Community Shield press conference, Klopp was in a positive mood about the Evian training camp despite the team’s faltering form in pre-season fixtures so far.
“[It’s] Massively important. We’re looking forward to it, absolutely.
“We got the information a couple of seconds ago that everybody’s fine, everybody’s coming in time, they got their flights and everything so from this afternoon on Shaq, Naby, Bobby, Mo and Alisson will be in training, which is great.
“So we have the game on Wednesday but obviously we had to learn in this pre-season that we play the games pretty much always a bit in the wrong moment, but we had to play them anyway so it was just another training session.
“But of course you would like to get a bit more from training sessions than we got for example from yesterday. We play Wednesday the game against Lyon but we have to see how we do that, we organised it months back when we thought ‘OK, they come back, they can maybe play 10, 20, 30 minutes or whatever’.
“We didn’t know in that moment it will be important for Shaq and Naby as well, but apart from that we have to prepare still the season and not only the game on Sunday, but of course the game on Sunday is the first proper game of the new season and so we try to be as good prepared as possible.”
Sadio Mané is the only player still enjoying his summer break as the Senegalese forward is not due back on Merseyside until next Monday, August 5th.
Liverpool will get the Premier League season kicked off on Friday week, August 9th, with a home fixture against newly-promoted Norwich City.
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We must remember that Allison, Mane, Salah and Firmino haven’t kicked a ball yet and Van Dijk has only recently returned so we have been playing without four or five of our best players all summer. However, the defending has been woeful, conceding at least two goals in every meaningful game, and the creativity from midfield has been shocking! The manager is obsessed with playing both Milner and Henderson despite neither of them having a clue what creativity means. We need two good players! When our manager ignores the fact we’ve made record profits, doesn’t buy anybody for the first team THIS year, and then states that City are the hot favourites this year my initial response has to be “Well sign somebody to even it up a bit!”
City have spent £63m, having beaten us to all three English trophies last year, and we are spending NOTHING, despite mammoth profits, as our manager admits City are hot favourites! They wouldn’t be if we bought two top players to freshen up the squad …….