Phil Thompson believes that two players at Liverpool will have given Arne Slot a ‘headache’ after the pre-season tour to USA.
The Reds won all three of their matches in the U.S. as the new head coach handed opportunities to a clutch of youngsters, with the likes of Fabio Carvalho and Sepp van den Berg seizing their chance to make a strong early impression on the 45-year-old.
The former LFC captain was speaking on talkSPORT when he singled out the duo for presenting the Dutchman with something of a dilemma as the start of the Premier League campaign swings into view.
Thompson said: “You look at all the players that he’s got. There are players who have come back in there like Carvalho and Sepp van den Berg, who have done very, very well on the pre-season tour. Those players, he is probably looking at and going ‘Oh my goodness, these can be a bit of a headache here’.”
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It’s certainly fair to say that Carvalho and Van den Berg were two of the big winners from Liverpool’s U.S. tour, with the former scoring against both Arsenal and Manchester United.
Whether their performances across the Atlantic were enough to have put them in contention for regular game-time at Anfield this season is another matter, as Slot now has his full complement of players back from holidays after Euro 2024 and the Copa America.
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At 21 and 22 respectively, the duo that Thompson mentioned might no longer be content with a backup role for the Reds or another loan move. Indeed, both have suitors who’d be interested in signing them permanently, and offers of £25m for Carvalho or £20m for Van den Berg may yet turn Richard Hughes’ head.
We’d like to see the ex-Fulham attacker and the Dutch defender being kept around the Liverpool squad, as they’ve shown that they can be viable first-team options for LFC this term, and the prospect of injuries to positional peers may also hand them unforeseen opportunities.
The fact that they’ve both presented the Anfield hierarchy with a real ‘headache’, as our former captain put it, is a testament to how well they’ve done in pre-season, when otherwise they could’ve been considered very much up for grabs had they not seized their moment in the USA.
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