Arne Slot has given an interesting insight into Federico Chiesa and his stance on players returning from injury.

The Italian missed nearly three months of the campaign through injury and returned to the Liverpool squad in December. But there was no major rush for Slot to immediately reintegrate the player, with Chiesa dropping out of the matchday squad for Premier League games against Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United after recovering from his injury.

The 27-year-old was only used sparingly in the cup competitions after coming back into the team and his three-minute cameo off the bench at the weekend against Brentford were his first Premier League minutes since September. Chiesa’s lack of game time has led to speculation that he could depart in January, just five months after his arrival from Serie A.

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That looks unlikely though, and Slot explained it’s his careful management of the former Juventus man that has stopped him playing more in recent weeks.

“At the moment we’ve got four attackers that are top fit and able to start the game, and Darwin [Nunez] is one of them,” the Dutchman explained when asked about Nunez’s play time.

“Then the fifth one is Federico. He’s not ready to start 90 yet in my opinion but is coming closer and closer to be able to do so. The reason why he isn’t is because he hasn’t had many minutes yet. So it’s not about him, it’s about me not giving him so many minutes, so that’s difficult for him then all of a sudden to go from five minutes to 90 minutes.”

Chiesa isn’t the only injured player that Slot has been reluctant to integrate back into the team and he has exercised similar caution with the likes of Diogo Jota, Harvey Elliott and Kostas Tsimikas this season.

“We saw how difficult it is, Jota is a great example, for a player who has been out for five, six, seven weeks, to bring him back to that load of playing every single game 60-90 minutes,” Slot explained when asked about players recovering from injury.

“You have to be really careful with that if you don’t want to go into another injury, especially because there is no winter break and there is no time during the weeks to give them a game.

“Unless I have to play them with the Under-21s, but I don’t think a player like Federico Chiesa or Diogo Jota should play in those games. That makes it hard if a player gets injured to bring them back.

“Unfortunately for Federico, he has Mo Salah in front of him,” Slot added, during his pre-Lille press conference.

“That makes it hard for us to build him up on the right way, but I’m happy he had a good 30-45 minutes against Accrington Stanley, and although it was five minutes, he was part of the team that scored two goals [at Brentford] and he was really happy with it.”