Jurgen Klopp has detailed why Liverpool had no option but to request last week's Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal be postponed - despite his players recording a significant number of 'false positives'.
The EFL granted a request from the Reds for last Thursday's scheduled first leg at the Emirates to be called off following a COVID outbreak through the club.
Liverpool were forced to close their AXA Training Centre for several days with assistant manager Peter Krawietz subsequently leading preparations for Sunday's FA Cup third round tie against Shrewsbury Town with both Klopp and Pep Lijnders isolating.
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Klopp was able to return for the match and later said many of the initial tests had returned a 'false positive' result that was confirmed by two later rounds of testing, prompting suspicion in certain quarters although the EFL claim they were satisfied with Liverpool's reasoning and had not received any official complaints from other clubs.
And now the Reds boss has explained the process that meant the Arsenal game was postponed and left him still unable to select from a raft of senior players against Shrewsbury.
"A false positive is a positive test you get," said Klopp, whose side entertain the Gunners in what is now the first leg on Thursday.
"You get a positive test back, and when you are able to do a retest, then a day or one-and-a-half days later you get a result which looks like it (the original test) is a false positive because it was negative.
"It doesn't change anything for your quarantine or whatever. But to prove that's wrong or right - because you want to know and you need to know - you have to do a third test. Then the third test shows it up.
"Between the first test and the second test, and the second and third test, you cannot use the players. That's how the rules are, and in general the rules are for all of us.
"Then they get a third test and it was negative as well, then that's it.
"But it was four days later. We couldn't do anything different. From the first moment we got the positive tests, we had to consider that it was the right result, as you can imagine. They were PCR tests, by the way."
