Steven Caulker Wins Twitter With Response to Calls for Liverpool Return
By Tom Gott
It's been a pretty rough few weeks for Liverpool.
Virgil van Dijk is out. Fabinho is out. Trent Alexander-Arnold is out and now Joe Gomez could be out for a long time after picking up an injury in England training, so there aren't exactly many defensive options for Jurgen Klopp to choose between.
Enter Steven Caulker.
The Englishman spent the second half of the 2015/16 season on loan at Anfield as emergency cover for Martin Skrtel and Dejan Lovren, and just over 24 hours later, the defender was brought on as an 88th-minute substitute against Arsenal... as a striker.
It was an iconic moment in Premier League history, and he's still a popular figure at Anfield because of it. With the Reds in their current predicament, there have been plenty of (non-serious) calls for Caulker to be drafted in once more.
His response?
"I’m only coming back if I’m playing up front!" he wrote on Twitter.
"I was shocked, I thought the gaffer was joking when he said it (go up front)," Caulker said of his stint as a striker at Liverpool (via the Liverpool Echo).
"With only four or five minutes to go we had to go for it and it paid off. It was an exciting five or six minutes. I was delighted to get on the pitch and help rescue a point."
The 28-year-old is currently strutting his stuff out in Turkey with Alanyaspor, where he has picked up a reputation as a goal-getting defender. Maybe Klopp wasn't so crazy after all!
With Caulker not coming back anytime soon, Klopp has Joel Matp as his only senior centre-back. Youngsters Rhys Williams, Nat Phillips and Sepp van den Berg are all in contention, while Fabinho is also expected back after the international break.