Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp has gone into greater detail about why the Reds had to postpone the first leg of the Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal last week.

There were calls for the club to be investigated by the EFL after Klopp revealed that the squad had received a number of “false positives”. These are very rare for Lateral Flow Tests, leading to suspicions about how testing at the club had been handled, but Klopp has clarified his comments by going through the process in his pre-match press conference today:

“You get a positive test back, and when you are able to do a retest, then a day or one-and-a-half days later you get a result which looks like it (the original test) is a false positive because it was negative. It doesn’t change anything for your quarantine or whatever. But to prove that’s wrong or right – because you want to know and you need to know – you have to do a third test. Then the third test shows it up.”

“Between the first test and the second test, and the second and third test, you cannot use the players. That’s how the rules are, and in general the rules are for all of us. Then they get a third test and it was negative as well, then that’s it. But it was four days later. We couldn’t do anything different. From the first moment we got the positive tests, we had to consider that it was the right result, as you can imagine. They were PCR tests, by the way.”

As Klopp explains, the players would have been forced to self-isolate anyway, even if they hadn’t come down with the virus, and this evidence was handed over to the EFL, who reluctantly postponed the match.

With the Emirates game being switched to the second leg, Liverpool effectively gave away their home advantage so the postponement has certainly not benefitted the Reds.