Klopp confirms Konate set for maiden Liverpool appearance on Tuesday

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has confirmed new signing Ibrahima Konate will make his first appearance for the club on Tuesday.

French defender Konate arrived from RB Leipzig for £36 million (€42m) in Liverpool’s first major off-season acquisition.

Konate was signed after Liverpool were hit with a series of injuries to defenders in their 2020-21 Premier League title defence, losing Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip.

The 22-year-old recruit joined the club’s pre-season camp in Austria and will play a part in their back-to-back 30-minute mini-games against Wacker Innsbruck and VfB Stuttgart.

“He’s had a good rest, had a normal pre-season so far, so he can play on Tuesday,” Klopp told liverpoolfc.com. “For Ibou it is important that he gets minutes quickly, that’s what pre-season is for.

“All the people from outside will say there are similarities between Leipzig and us and that is true, but anyway there are differences as well and the similarities are important but the differences are more important because you see that in training.

“There are some little habits where he is doing different to what we usually do, so we work on that but that’s now not that easy because that’s only six days now.

“All fine, completely normal. The first few days are there to realise what is the boy doing when he is not thinking. Natural stuff. And then from there we start and that’s why he has to play and that’s what will happen.

“Then we will see how quickly we can get all this information together for him and then everything is fine. For a defender it’s not as difficult as it would be for other players but it’s still a job to do, and that is what we are doing.”

Liverpool have friendlies scheduled against FSV Mainz and Hertha Berlin on July 23 and July 29 respectively.

Excitement levels = 100

Jürgen Klopp has confirmed we’ll see @IbrahimaKonate_ in action on Tuesday

— Liverpool FC (@LFC) July 18, 2021