Arne Slot has confirmed that Luis Diaz missed Liverpool’s pre-season defeat to AC Milan due to transfer speculation, while also explaining Darwin Nunez‘s absence.
Diaz has been present from the start of Liverpool’s pre-season but has not played a single minute of any of the three friendlies to date this summer.
He is Bayern Munich‘s priority target and This Is Anfield understands that while the two clubs remain in dialogue there is, as of Friday, no new offer to have arrived.
Liverpool rejected a first offer worth around £59 million, and Slot confirmed after the defeat to AC Milan that he was left out of the friendly due to the ongoing talks over his future.
“There’s a lot of rumours around him lately and I cannot go into that. He’s training really well with us,” Slot said, “but we’ve decided, for now, not to play him yet.
“I’m used to talking to most of my players on a regular basis, like I said, Lucho is training really well and we’ve decided he’s not playing at the moment. I cannot comment much more about that.”
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The Colombian watched from the bench alongside the other seven senior players to miss out, which included Nunez – who is attracting interest from Saudi side Al-Hilal.
The reason for the No. 9’s absence, however, was due to a minor fitness issue.
Slot said: “In Darwin’s situation, he’s trained also really well and played a few good games for us, but he was injured so we didn’t want to take a risk with him as well.”
The Liverpool head coach added, while also speaking on Wataru Endo who missed out due to illness, that he “assumes they will be there with us” for the next game in Japan.
Bayern are seemingly desperate to get the Diaz deal done having made a new attacker one of their priorities after losing Leroy Sane and Thomas Muller and seeing Jamal Musiala break his leg.
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