Ryan Gravenberch left the field hurt during Liverpool’s Europa League victory on Thursday night, but Jurgen Klopp has allayed concerns that he would spend some time on the sidelines,
The midfielder made his debut as the Reds rallied from behind to defeat LASK 3-1 in Austria after making the £35 million summer transfer from Bayern Munich.
With the assist on Luis Diaz’s second-half goal, which gave the visitors the lead for the first time in the game, Gravenberch excelled in his pivotal midfield position.
However, Liverpool fans expressed alarm when they witnessed the 21-year-old Dutchman hesitantly making his way off the field while being replaced. Klopp, however, maintains that the issue was merely cramp and not a major one.
The Liverpool manager was quoted on TNT Sports as saying, “[He played] very well, he told me he had cramp so that makes sense.”
I believe it was his first start in a while, and he performed admirably. He was the best player on the field for a while, but in the first half, you could see him start to get a little frustrated and you could hear him asking, “Where is he?”
But, as Klopp noted, “that’s normal; these things happen, and he played as long as he could and had really good moments, set up a good goal for Luis Diaz, and for not knowing a lot about his team-mates, it looked pretty tuned.”
No one who began that game for Liverpool seven years ago appeared for them on Thursday as they opened their championship run in the second-tier cup competition in Europe.
Following his debut as a substitute in Liverpool’s weekend victory over Wolves, Gravenberch was given his first Premier League start for the dominant club.
Prior to that, Thomas Tuchel hooked him after 71 minutes of Bayern Munich’s 2-1 Bundesliga victory against Koln on the penultimate day of the previous campaign.
