{"id":23808,"date":"2025-07-26T14:56:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-26T14:56:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/23808\/"},"modified":"2025-07-26T14:56:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-26T14:56:08","slug":"liverpool-2-4-ac-milan-florian-wirtz-starts-in-hong-kong-defeat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/23808\/","title":{"rendered":"Liverpool 2-4 AC Milan: Florian Wirtz starts in Hong Kong defeat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Liverpool’s record signing Florian Wirtz made his first start for his new club as Arne Slot’s side were beaten 4-2 by AC Milan at a sold-out Kai Tak Stadium in Hong Kong.<\/p>\n

However, there was no place for Darwin Nunez or Luis Diaz in the Reds squad amid speculation they could leave following the arrival of Hugo Ekitike<\/a> and the pursuit of Newcastle United’s Alexander Isak<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Slot said after the game that Nunez missed the match because of injury but Colombia forward Diaz was left out as a result of “speculation on his future”.<\/p>\n

Liverpool legend Sir Kenny Dalglish laid a wreath of flowers before kick-off and the players had ‘Diogo J 20’ on their shirts in tribute to their former team-mate Diogo Jota, who died in a car accident<\/a> as he and his brother Andre Silva drove through the Spanish province of Zamora earlier this month.<\/p>\n

The Premier League champions dominated the opening 10 minutes but it was the Italian side who opened the scoring when a counter-attack ended with Rafael Leao smashing past Alisson Becker.<\/p>\n

Dominik Szoboszlai equalised with a fine curling strike into the top corner of Mike Maignan’s goal from the edge of the box.<\/p>\n

England midfielder Ruben Loftus-Cheek restored Milan’s lead early in the second half as the Reds were again caught short at the back and Noah Okafor made it 3-1 with a brilliant finish beyond Liverpool’s new Georgia goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili.<\/p>\n

Cody Gakpo pulled one back in added time with a header from Ibrahima Konate’s pinpoint ball into the box but an awful mix-up between Mamardashvili and Kostas Tsimikas allowed Okafor to net his second.<\/p>\n

Liverpool now travel to Japan and will play Yokohama F. Marinos on Wednesday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Liverpool’s record signing Florian Wirtz made his first start for his new club as Arne Slot’s side were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":23809,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,596,85],"class_list":["post-23808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23808\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}