Arne Slot has confirmed that Ibrahima Konate sustained an injury to his quadriceps muscle before being substituted during Liverpool’s last-minute defeat at Chelsea. As if defeat was not bad enough for the Reds, the French defender was hauled off 10 minutes into the second half at Stamford Bridge, where the Reds went on to suffer a 2-1 loss following a stoppage-time winner from Chelsea substitute Willian Estevao.
Konate was visibly frustrated as he made his way down the tunnel, with Slot acknowledging he had to withdraw him to prevent the injury from worsening. “I don’t know if it’s a big injury, but I do know that he limped,” said the Liverpool head coach. “And I asked him, and he said: ‘I feel my quad a little bit.’
“But for me all alarm bells go off because in another sprint then you never know if that is going to go good, so it was already a substitution I had in mind for maybe a little bit later, because the right centre-back has a lot of ball possession, and we all know that Ryan (Gravenberch) is good in there.
“So it might be okay and he went off early enough, but it was clear that I had to take him off because he was limping.”
Reflecting on the defeat, Liverpool’s third consecutive loss, Slot, who has already lost another centre-back Giovanni Leoni to a season-ending injury, said: “It was similar to the (Crystal) Palace game, although the playing styles of both teams were completely different.
“But what wasn’t similar to the Palace game was in the first half I think we played, not our best football, but still very good. We had three big chances. they only had one and they scored it.
“That was completely different to the Palace game as they had many chances in the first half. The second half performance, like in Palace, I liked. We created more than enough chances to score more than one goal, last week and today.
“When we did there was a period of the game where I thought we were going to win it. We came very close with good chances and moments where we had four vs three in our favour. In the last 10 mins it was end to end. Both teams could have won it, and we didn’t and Chelsea did.”