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Football

10th Jan 2022

Jurgen Klopp hails Tyrone native Conor Bradley after impressive FA Cup outing

Lee Costello

“I am delighted.”

18-year-old Conor Bradley truly is living the dream at the moment, as young the lad from Tyrone is rubbing shoulders with some of the Premier Leagues top stars.

Training every week with the likes of Mohammad Salah, Sadio Mane, Jordan Henderson and many others must already feel like an incredible achievement, but the young irishman isn’t just there to make up the numbers.

In a side captained by Virgil van Dijk, the youngster lined up next to the Holland star in defence, as Liverpool took on Shrewsbury in the FA Cup.

(Photo by Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)

Despite going a goal down, the Reds managed to regain control and assert their dominance to win 4-1 in the end, and the manager was very impressed with what he saw from Bradley.

“I am delighted, even when I know they both can do so much better because they are real talents,” Klopp said of 18-year-old Bradley and Gordon, who at 17 became the club’s youngster FA Cup scorer.

“I’m really happy about that and I’m happy about a lot of things. Conor can play how good he could be and can be in the future. And Kaide obviously finishing-wise he’s an adult, his finishing is really exceptional, but all the rest he is still a kid.

[caption id="attachment_246325" align="alignnone" width="1024"] (Photo by James Baylis – AMA/Getty Images)

“So playing the position the way he plays, there is so much to improve.”

The German gaffer also revealed that one of the reason that so many players weren’t available for selection, was due to false positive COVID-19 tests.

“This was the team we could line up today and the boys did really well,” added Klopp.

(Photo by Matthew Ashton – AMA/Getty Images)

“We had last week a proper outbreak and it showed up that we had a lot of false positives but the rules are like they are so all these players who are false positives couldn’t play.

“The only real positive came from Trent Alexander-Arnold and all the rest was false positives.”