Five fitness worries and one big European test for Liverpool
Liverpool travel to Austria this week for their first away assignment in this season’s Champions League, and the mood around the squad is noticeably more cautious than it was a week ago. Sunday’s 3-0 defeat to Manchester City left bruises beyond the scoreline, and Andoni Iraola now has to manage a growing injury list heading into a difficult European fixture against LASK, with kick off in Linz scheduled for Wednesday evening.
A squad already under pressure
The home defeat to City ended Iraola’s unbeaten start as Liverpool head coach, and it did so in brutal fashion once Ryan Gravenberch was sent off just after the hour mark. City scored three times inside twenty minutes once Liverpool were down to ten men, and the fallout from that afternoon has rolled straight into preparations for Wednesday’s trip. Iraola was candid enough after the match to suggest some of his unavailable players were unlikely to be fit in time, which is not the reassurance Liverpool supporters were hoping for this week. It leaves the head coach needing to manage both the tactical fallout of Sunday and a genuine selection headache in the same short turnaround.
Where the attacking options thin out
Three names stand out among the doubts: Alexander Isak, Cody Gakpo and Dominik Szoboszlai. Isak remains Liverpool’s most direct central threat, Gakpo gives Iraola a forward who can play across the front line, and Szoboszlai’s energy in midfield is exactly the kind of quality that tends to be missed against sides who sit in and wait. Losing any one of those three would be a blow. Losing all three at once, even for one match, forces a genuine rethink of how Liverpool want to approach a European away day, and it leaves considerably less room for error in a squad that is already feeling the effects of a congested fixture list.
Two more enforced absences
It gets worse before it gets better. Federico Chiesa and Wataru Endo are both ineligible rather than injured, left out of the club’s squad list for the opening half of this season’s Champions League campaign. That is a separate problem to manage and one that further narrows Iraola’s options for Linz, regardless of how training sessions go over the next 48 hours. Between the fitness doubts and the eligibility rules, Liverpool could realistically be missing five senior squad members for a fixture they cannot afford to treat lightly.
Our take
None of this excuses what happened against City, but it does explain some of the anxiety heading into a tricky away fixture. Liverpool have shown under Iraola that they can be aggressive and purposeful when fit players are available in the right areas, yet LASK will fancy their chances if the visitors arrive short of options in attack and midfield. Our view is that Iraola should resist the temptation to gamble on fitness just to keep a settled look to the side. A pragmatic selection, built around whoever is genuinely ready rather than whoever is theoretically available, gives Liverpool a far better chance of returning from Austria with the three points this squad badly needs right now. Getting the next 48 hours of assessment right matters just as much as anything that happens on the pitch in Linz.