The first leg of Liverpool's Carabao Cup semi-final against Arsenal was canceled due to a suspected COVID-19 outbreak.
The EFL is said to be 'under pressure' from its clubs to investigate the circumstances that led to the postponement of Liverpool's Carabao Cup semi-final first leg against Arsenal.
Jurgen Klopp's team was scheduled to play Arsenal at the Emirates last Thursday, but the game was canceled due to Liverpool's concerns about a number of positive coronavirus tests within the camp, which caused the AXA Training Centre to be temporarily closed a day before the scheduled first leg date.
Liverpool requested the delay "due to an increasing number of suspected positive COVID-19 cases and player availability."
The EFL approved the Reds' request to cancel the game, but they are now under pressure to clarify the situation following Klopp's comments after beating Shrewsbury Town.
According to an Athletic report, the Liverpool manager stated that all but one of the new positives were 'false positives,' which has 'upset' certain EFL clubs.
Their dissatisfaction is said to stem from the EFL declining postponement requests due to similar COVID-19 issues and forcing them to play on.
If the EFL finds that Liverpool failed to fulfill a fixture, the club could face a'severe punishment,' according to the Athletic.
However, according to the report, Liverpool went through "at least two rounds of testing prior to the postponement," including PCR tests "carried out by an independent laboratory." Nonetheless, a third set of tests "conducted after the scheduled first leg" yielded a slew of negative results.
Klopp told reporters on Sunday about the 'false positives' and how things unfolded: "The situation is as follows: we thought we had a proper outbreak last week, but it turned out that we had a lot of false positive results.
"But because the rules are as they are, all of these players who are false positives were unable to play today [against Shrewsbury]. Or we decided not to play them, whatever the case may be.
"Would we have been able to play them? "I'm not sure why, but we had to make that decision." Trent Alexander-Arnold was the only real extra positive from the team, and the rest were false positives, so it was a really tough week for the boys because they couldn't train.
"We had to close the training ground because you have two extra testing grounds, which makes it extremely difficult."
It was difficult for a variety of reasons, but as I previously stated, this was the team we could line up with today, and the boys performed admirably."
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