Florian Wirtz was absent from Liverpool\u2019s starting line-up against Chelsea after being left out with an illness on Saturday. The Germany international\u2019s difficult debut season at the club suffered another setback when he was reported to be unavailable due to feeling unwell, a situation first revealed by The Athletic\u2019s James Pearce. It was clarified by BBC Sport as a case of a stomach bug.<\/p>\n
Wirtz had been substituted from last weekend\u2019s damaging derby defeat to Manchester United, where he operated as a false nine alongside Dominik Szoboszlai. In that match Szoboszlai outshone his ephemeral teammate and Wirtz was described in press coverage as having been bullied out of the game. The chance to respond to that performance was removed when the playmaker missed Wednesday\u2019s training session after feeling “a bit unwell,” as Arne Slot revealed during his prematch press conference. Slot later downplayed concerns by confirming Wirtz had returned to training.<\/p>\n
Slot selected a 4-2-3-1 for the Chelsea match: Giorgi Mamardashvili; Curtis Jones, Virgil van Dijk, Ibrahima Konat\u00e9, Milos Kerkez; Ryan Gravenberch, Alexis Mac Allister; Jeremie Frimpong, Dominik Szoboszlai, Rio Ngumoha; Cody Gakpo.<\/p>\n
Substitutes: Freddie Woodman (GK), Joe Gomez, Andy Robertson, Federico Chiesa, Trey Nyoni, Kieran Morrison, Mor Talla Ndiaye, Will Wright, Alexander Isak.<\/p>\n
Wirtz\u2019s absence coincided with a tactical change. Slot appeared to abandon the double false nine system used in the 3\u20132 reverse at Old Trafford, instead deploying Rio Ngumoha as a natural winger in place of the floating Wirtz role. That shift restored Szoboszlai to his preferred attacking midfield position, while Jeremie Frimpong retained the right-wing slot. Frimpong was moved into a more advanced role partly because Mohamed Salah remains absent; Salah only has three more chances to make another appearance for Liverpool before his pre-planned summer departure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wirtz left out with stomach bug; Slot alters shape, Szoboszlai returned to attacking midfield. vs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13699,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,175,172],"tags":[299,1305,1304],"class_list":["post-13700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-liverpool","category-epl","tag-arne-slot","tag-bench-selection","tag-benching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}