What I’m seeing at Liverpool: Salah an early returner, Neuro11 deal ends and legends match in March

The Liverpool squad will start to reconvene at Kirkby on Tuesday as the focus turns to Sunday’s Premier League clash with Chelsea at Anfield.

Head coach Arne Slot spent last weekend with his family back home in the Dutch city of Zwolle but the international break didn’t stop him from getting his fix of club football. He went to watch a game on Saturday at nearby VV Heino, who play in the Netherlands’ fifth tier.

Slot will be wary of what happened straight after the September break when Liverpool delivered a sluggish display against Nottingham Forest and lost 1-0 — the only blot on his Anfield copybook so far.

However, preparations should be better this time around. As well as having an extra 24 hours before they play Chelsea, the Premier League leaders also have key personnel back on Merseyside earlier than expected. Mohamed Salah will be rested by Egypt for their trip to Mauritania tonight and captain Virgil van Dijk was released by the Netherlands after his red card against Hungary.

Salah scored in Egypt’s AFCON qualifier in Cairo against Mauritania on Friday but has been rested for Tuesday’s match between the two teams in Nouakchott (Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, international commitments for Caoimhin Kelleher, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Kostas Tsimikas, Curtis Jones, Ibrahima Konate, Dominik Szoboszlai, Ryan Gravenberch and Cody Gakpo are already complete.

Jarell Quansah, Andy Robertson, Conor Bradley, Wataru Endo, Diogo Jota, Alexis Mac Allister, Luis Diaz and Darwin Nunez will all head back following matches on Tuesday night.

It will be a staggered return, with Slot granting some players extra time off with one eye on Liverpool’s upcoming schedule of seven games in the space of 20 days. The South American trio of Mac Allister, Diaz and Nunez will be the final players to report back, with the full squad unlikely to train together until Friday.

Talking of Chelsea, the Londoners are set to provide the opposition for the next legends match at Anfield.

Discussions are at an advanced stage and if an agreement is reached, then an announcement will follow next month. The date of Saturday, March 22, during the international break has been pencilled in.

It’s become a popular annual tradition at Anfield, with a crowd of 59,655 watching Liverpool Legends beat Ajax Legends 4-2 in March. It was the day when former England boss Sven-Goran Eriksson fulfilled his wish to manage a Liverpool team and the event raised close to £1.2 million for the work of the LFC Foundation.

In recent years, Anfield has also hosted legends games against Manchester United, Barcelona and Celtic.

Sven-Goran Eriksson, who died in August, managed Liverpool’s legends team at Anfield in March (Oli Scarff/AFP via Getty Images)

Taking on Chelsea Legends in March would be timely given that it’s close to the 20th anniversary of the Champions League semi-final second leg between the two clubs when Rafael Benitez’s side famously booked their passage to Istanbul and Jose Mourinho complained about Luis Garcia’s “ghost goal”.

It was a period when familiarity bred contempt, with Liverpool and Chelsea facing each other a remarkable 22 times in all competitions between February 2005 and April 2009. That run included meetings in the League Cup final, Community Shield, FA Cup semi-final, three Champions League semi-finals and a quarter-final.

Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Fernando Torres could be locking horns with John Terry, Frank Lampard and Didier Drogba once again.

When Liverpool won the Carabao Cup at Wembley in February courtesy of Van Dijk’s header from Tsimikas’s corner, two German neuroscientists were watching proudly from the stands.

Dr Niklas Hausler and Patrick Hantschke, co-founders of Potsdam-based Neuro11, had worked with the players on set-piece situations, including penalties, in the build-up to the showpiece final.

Their methods include attaching electrodes to players’ heads in training to measure brain activity and help them get ‘in the zone’ by reaching their optimal mental state.

They first started working with Liverpool in 2021 and Jurgen Klopp credited them with having an “incredible” role to play in Liverpool’s two domestic cup final triumphs over Chelsea in 2022, which were both decided on penalties.

However, their consultancy arrangement with the club ended in May and Arne Slot has opted to do without their services. Currently, there are no plans to bring Hausler and Hantschke back on track.

There’s positive news on young striker Jayden Danns, who has been sidelined since pre-season with a stress fracture in his back.

The 18-year-old academy graduate has been given the green light to step up his recovery with the club’s under-21s squad. His training load is being gradually increased before he returns to action with Barry Lewtas’ side.

The injury meant that Danns missed out on the opportunity to impress Slot during Liverpool’s pre-season tour of America when most of the club’s senior attackers were absent. It also ended the conversation about a possible loan move to gain more senior experience amid interest from Wayne Rooney’s Plymouth Argyle.

Danns burst on to the scene last season, scoring twice in five first-team appearances, and was rewarded with a new long-term contract in May.

Meanwhile, there was the welcome sight of Harvey Elliott back outside jogging at Kirkby after completing a gym session on Monday. Elliott, 21, was forced to pull out of the England Under-21s squad last month after experiencing discomfort during training and a scan revealed a fractured bone in his left foot.

Initial talk of targeting the visit of Chelsea for a comeback proved to be overly optimistic but he could feature again by the end of October.

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(Top photos: Getty Images)