Liverpool are looking for a new assistant manager for the second year running after losing John Heitinga to Ajax.

Heitinga was a surprise appointment last summer having been an Everton player for half-a-decade in the mid-2000s.

But despite his Blues past, the Dutchman took to Liverpool like a duck to water, becoming a key part of Arne Slot‘s new look coaching team.

Highly-rated across Europe, it felt like a matter of time before Heitinga became a head coach himself, and that moment duly arrived last week as the 41-year-old re-joined his former club.

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Liverpool must move on quickly and there are a number of standout candidates emerging to take Heitinga’s role, including a high profile former Reds star.

Photo by TOM GOYVAERTS/Belga/AFP via Getty Images

The Liverpool coaching team hit the ground running last summer and instantly gelled into an excellent cohesive unit.

It remains to be seen how taking Heitinga out of that will impact Slot, but one argument is that it could be worth getting someone in who already knows the club inside and out.

In that respect, Dirk Kuyt is an interesting candidate.

18 turned that down, journalist David Lynch says he may now get a reprieve.

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“I think Dirk Kuyt’s definitely in the mix,” Lynch told Anfield Index.

But I’m pretty certain from a couple of calls that I made that he’s in the mix at the very least.”

“I think that might be true of Marino Pusic as well maybe, who was Arne Slot’s assistant at Feyenoord.”

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“From conversations I’ve had I get the impression that he’s [Pusic] in the mix, adds the journalist.

“I’ve not got the impression that they’ve honed in on any particular candidate but we’ll see, they’ll want that in place by pre-season, so I imagine that story will move quite quickly but that’s a couple of names I can vouch for.”

Ultimately, it is hard to gauge exactly how much influence an assistant coach has on any given team.

In Liverpool’s case, it is also worth pointing out that whoever comes in would essentially be Slot’s third-in -command, behind himself and Sipke Hulshoff.

It would make a lot of sense for Slot to try and link up with Pusic again.

He, Hulshoff and Pusic were the team who fired Feyenoord to glory in the Eredivisie after all.

From a fans’ point of view, though, it would be fantastic to see Kuyt back at Anfield.

The 44-year-old has cut his teeth as a manager at ADO Den Haag and Beerschot and although things have not always gone well, he has earned his stripes.

Seeing the curly-haired Dutchman back 13 years on from leaving would be a special moment and it sounds like it really could happen.
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