Skip to playerSkip to main content
  • 4 months ago
Liverpool boss Arne Slot on the fitness of Alexander Isak and the chance he will play given the ban for Hugo Ekitike
AXA Training Centre, Liverpool, UK
Transcript
00:00Is Alexander Isak ready to start now, obviously thinking with no Hugo Erketike in particular?
00:07Yeah, he's able to break minutes again. I still feel 90 is...
00:13Depends also on the pace and the intensity of the game, but that might be a bit too much.
00:18But not only that, also for the long term, so you can give a player maybe one,
00:23I would call stupid, hit to bring him to 90 and then his body is completely...
00:28He brought him too far over the line, so I don't think it's smart to play him 90 yet.
00:33But yeah, he's further into his pre-season now, and normally after two or three weeks in pre-season,
00:40players go to 60, 70 minutes, and in some clubs they even bring them to 90,
00:45but if you look at our pre-season, we mainly bring them to 60 to 70 minutes then.
00:50Just check on Hugo as well, because there's been a report that he'd been disciplined over his sending off the other night.
00:56Has he been fine or anything like that?
00:59Discipline means that I spoke to him, then it's disciplined, but I don't think that it's disciplined.
01:04Discipline means fine and that he didn't gut, so it wasn't very smart what he did,
01:11what he recognised himself immediately straight away, so he said sorry straight away to his teammates.
01:18He's young, players of all ages do make mistakes, and that's what he did in this situation as well,
01:27but we all make mistakes and you're allowed at this club to make a mistake without immediately getting fines or these kind of things.
01:37He's a fantastic human being, I think if you talk to all the staff members and you would ask him a top three of the warmest persons
01:45and the most polite persons, I think he's in every staff member's top three.
01:49So even if he wasn't a person like this, he was able to make a mistake, but he wasn't smart.
01:56But it didn't hurt us one Tuesday evening, it might hurt us a bit more tomorrow.
02:03The positive thing is that Federico Chiesa showed that he is showing himself at the moment,
02:11so it's also a chance for him now to be on the bench and maybe he kept playing minutes with Hugo not being there.
Comments

Recommended