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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
Sport
David Lynch

Jurgen Klopp calms Roberto Firmino injury fears and is hopeful Liverpool star will return for Barcelona

Firmino missed Friday's thrashing of Huddersfield. (Picture: Action Images via Reuters)

Jurgen Klopp has revealed that Roberto Firmino is ‘more likely than not’ to recover from injury in time to face Barcelona next week.

The Brazilian striker was left out of the Liverpool squad for Friday’s 5-0 thrashing of Huddersfield Town after sustaining a minor muscle tear in training.

However, his tendency to quickly overcome fitness issues quickly means Klopp is confident ahead of Wednesday’s trip to Camp Nou.

The Reds boss said: “Bobby trained yesterday completely normal. It was not high intensity, we had to work on set-pieces a bit, a couple of things.

“I didn’t see it in training, it happened obviously in the last situation in training, he felt the muscle a little bit. Now that’s the official diagnosis, he has a small tear in a very small muscle - apart from the word ‘tear’ everything is positive.

“It’s Bobby so he might be ready for Wednesday but we don’t know obviously in the moment.

“But because it’s him it’s more likely than not but we will see.

“Of all the badness you can get it’s pretty much the best but it’s still bad enough that he couldn’t play tonight.”

Virgil van Dijk gave fans an injury scare during an ultimately comfortable victory over Jan Siewert’s men, going down clutching his foot in the second half.

But the Dutchman’s ability to complete the 90 minutes is proof enough that he suffered no lasting effects, according to Klopp.

He added: “I asked him and he would have been immediately [off] but he said all good.”

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