Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has confirmed that star forward, Philippe Coutinho will not be part of his team’s trip to West Ham United on Saturday.
He, however, said Sadio Mane could make a return at the London Stadium on Saturday evening.
Coutinho will miss a third consecutive match with an adductor problem, while Mane participated in full training on Thursday for the first time since injuring his hamstring on international duty last month.
Other injured players, Georginio Wijnaldum (ankle) and Dejan Lovren (thigh) will have their fitness monitored to see whether they can feature.
Klopp told news conference on Friday, “Phil is not available.
“Gini [Wijnaldum] I’m not sure, we have to see. It’s painful what he has but maybe he can cope with it. We will have to see.
“Dejan, yes, maybe today is the clearing session and we know that in weeks like this you have to wait until the last second to make the squad or the lineup.
“Sadio trained yesterday for the first time with the team and looked really, really good. We will see what we do with that.
“Yesterday it looked like he is ready for at least 20-25 minutes but we have to wait to see how his body reacts to the session because for him it was pretty intense — not because it was intense but because it was his first football session for a long time.
“He did really well, he obviously didn’t miss his abilities or skills during the injury break, so that’s good.”
Mane has been included in Senegal squad for their final round of World Cup qualifiers — two fixtures against South Africa on Nov. 10 and Nov. 14.
Klopp added, “We cannot sit here and ignore the situation of Senegal and say we don’t care if they qualify for the World Cup. That’s not nice and that’s not right.
“We are trying to get in touch with the Senegal FA. Sadio is not injured anymore, is he 100 percent fit? That’s different. He’s in a good way and yesterday he looked really good.
“We have to first think about what we do because when you see Sadio, it’s like: ‘OK, maybe we can use him.’ And it’s the same for Senegal.
“If he goes there — he has to go there — then he has a few days of training and if they get the point they need, maybe we can get in touch with them again and ask if it’s necessary for him to play the second game and then he could come back. That would be the ideal situation, but we can’t decide that — FIFA doesn’t give the clubs the opportunity to decide when they play for their countries.
“There are clear rules and we respect them. In this specific case, if he goes it would be good for his rhythm.
“I have no problems with our players going to represent their national teams. It’s only that we need to know as much as possible about their circumstances — what they do in training and stuff like that, which is very important for us.
“It’s not that I want to tell them what they should be doing for training, but I just want to know what my players are doing. If Sadio can play, I think he should play because it would be good for him to get rhythm, otherwise he has not played for how many weeks with two interruptions — first the red card, then injury — and we play Southampton so it would be nice for him to be in rhythm.
“The injury risk is always there, even in training, and we can’t do anything about that.”
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