Arne Slot has been at pains to highlight the positives in Florian Wirtz\u2019s first months at Liverpool, notably the midfielder\u2019s early durability after moving from Bayer Leverkusen. \u201cBecause he had to make a step from where he played towards Liverpool, towards the Premier League, and that he stayed fit all the time tells you a lot about the mentality and the work rate of a player\u2014and about the performance staff.\u201d<\/p>\n
That initial promise was interrupted in mid-February when Wirtz developed a back problem. His tally of missed matches has grown since he sat out the club\u2019s victory over Nottingham Forest on Feb. 22 and the absence now threatens to extend further across the coming days and weeks.<\/p>\n
Wirtz\u2019s adaptation to England was notable. Across his first 15 appearances in the competition he played the full 90 minutes just once, yet up until his first absence against Nottingham Forest he had seen out seven of 10 successive top-flight matches. Earlier in his short Liverpool career his most common issues were cramp, attributed to the searing speed of the Premier League compared with Germany, and a muscle issue that caused one previous absence this season.<\/p>\n
Injuries are not unfamiliar to Wirtz. He tore his cruciate ligament at 18 and, before the current problem, he only once missed more than one match in succession through injury when he spent a month out with a knee problem towards the end of his final Bundesliga campaign.<\/p>\n
Slot\u2019s public comments on timing have been cautious and occasionally mistaken. After Wirtz missed the Nottingham Forest game the manager predicted that he would be available for the following weekend\u2019s visit from West Ham United, a forecast that did not come to pass. \u201cUsually, when I say that, I do know that but I don\u2019t want to share it, but now I honestly don\u2019t know,\u201d Slot shrugged.<\/p>\n
After the 5\u20132 win over West Ham, and with the squad preparing for Wolverhampton Wanderers, Slot said: \u201cI think that will be too early,\u201d Liverpool\u2019s manager sighed, \u201cbut I said last week I didn\u2019t expect him not to be available for today, so sometimes with an injury things can develop in a positive way or in a negative way.<\/p>\n
“Now we are thinking it doesn\u2019t have to take too long, but Tuesday will probably be too early. The week after will be tight as things stand now, but as I said, I thought that he would be available for today as well, which didn\u2019t happen unfortunately.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wirtz’s campaign paused by a back problem after a very strong adaptation to Liverpool; staff praised<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7156,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,969],"tags":[1073,1081,299],"class_list":["post-7157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-liverpool","category-premier-league","tag-acl-injury","tag-adaptation","tag-arne-slot"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7157","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=7157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7157\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}