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Liverpool’s Brazilian duo Fabinho and Alisson are travelling directly to Madrid from international duty, skipping the Premier League match against Watford, manager Jurgen Klopp has revealed.
Both players were part of the Brazil squad that beat Uruguay 4-1 in a World Cup qualifier Thursday night, Fabinho playing 71 minutes with Alisson on the bench as an unused substitute. Liverpool’s return to Premier League action, an early kick off against Watford on Saturday, is around 36 hours after Tite’s side kicked off in Manaus leaving the players with what Klopp views as insufficient time to recover.
Instead, both will travel directly to Spain, where Liverpool are facing Atletico Madrid on Tuesday in what could be the toughest match of their Champions League group stage campaign. Had Fabinho and Alisson returned to the UK they would also have had to quarantine due to having travelled to Colombia for an earlier qualifier. They will remain in Madrid until Thursday, joining up with Klopp’s squad in time for that weekend’s clash with Manchester United.
“I am not frustrated about it,” he said, “we have no chance, obviously [of involving them]. Somebody decided to give Brazil the opportunity to play last night, so a few hours ago, then somebody made the decision that we have to play Saturday 12:30 p.m. [BST, 8:30 a.m. ET]. If we say something, people say that’s why you have a big squad. But you have a big squad not for issues you have with football associations because they put in tournaments.
“Atletico are not playing at the weekend. Something like that would never happen here and if it would happen [people would say] ‘my god, how can they do it for them’? We’ve known for a while, we made our decision a while ago. We had to sort quarantine issues and all these kinds of things. The decision we made is the boys will not be here, they will go directly to Madrid, wait there for us, be able to play hopefully…
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Source : cbssports
