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Football

07th Jan 2019

Lovren off injured after six minutes, replaced by Liverpool’s youngest ever FA Cup player

Niall McIntyre

In fairness to Dejan Lovren, he’s played some amount of football recently.

Having started and finished each and every one of Liverpool’s games over a hectic festive period, the sight of Dejan Lovren pulling up and eventually limping out of Liverpool’s FA Cup third round clash with a soft tissue injury is hardly a surprising one.

Along with James Milner, Lovren was the only other Liverpool player to retain their starting place from the loss to Man City three days ago with the club’s lack of depth in the centre half position again coming to the fore.

With Joel Matip and Joe Gomez both sidelined with long term injuries, there isn’t much cover in the area and Klopp has recently said that Kildare 20-year-old Conor Masterson is next in line.

Unfortunately, the Irish man didn’t get the chance to make his debut on Monday evening with Klopp instead opting to bring Fabinho back from his traditional defensive midfield position back to centre back to partner Lovren.

With van Dijk indispensable at this stage, Klopp decided to rest him but he didn’t have the same luxury with Lovren, an admittedly more dispensable type.

But no matter how much they criticise him or how much they give out about him, the plain fact is that Liverpool need Lovren now and his injury after just three minutes in this one does come as a blow to them.

He was limping very early on in Molineux and went to the ground as early as the sixth minute holding his hamstring.

He was soon replaced by 16-year-old Ki Jana Hoever who became the club’s youngest ever player to play in the competition at just 16 years of age.

And in fairness to him, he acquitted himself very well in the deep end, making a few blocks, looking composed in possession throughout and all Liverpool fans were all saying the same thing about it.

They had more to worry about a couple of minutes later when Raul Jimenez darted through the middle and fired Wolves into a 1-0 lead…

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