Andy Robertson: Returning stars will give us a boost
Andy Robertson expects the impending returns of several stars to provide Liverpool with a timely fillip with the start of the season now just a week away.
The gradual reforming of Jürgen Klopp’s full squad will gather pace on Monday, when Alisson Becker, Roberto Firmino and Mohamed Salah will report for pre-season training in Evian.
Naby Keita and Xherdan Shaqiri, meanwhile, are also set to re-join the group at the beginning of their training camp in the south of France.
Robertson believes that quintet will have an immediate and positive effect on the Reds, who face Lyon in Geneva on Wednesday prior to next weekend’s FA Community Shield clash with Manchester City at Wembley.
“The lads coming back, even if they don’t play, it gives you a lift when they train and with the way they go about their business,” the left-back told Liverpoolfc.com following Sunday’s 3-0 friendly defeat to Napoli in Edinburgh.
“It doesn’t matter if they play on Wednesday or not, that’s completely up to the manager three days in, but that’s irrelevant: if they’re back in training and back around the place then it makes a difference.
“Mo and Bobby are two of our main men and Alisson was magnificent last season. They are huge characters in the changing room as well so that’ll be massive for us, and then Sadio will come back the following week.
“Once we get the whole team back together, and I think Shaq and Naby aren’t far off too, they’re players that are familiar around the set-up and around the system and that’s what we need. The quicker we get all of us back together then hopefully the better.
“But it’s not anyone else’s fault, the young lads or whatever who have come in, we’ve all not been good enough and maybe Bobby and Mo and people like that will give us the lift that we need. Hopefully that does happen.”
The absences of Alisson, Firmino, Keita, Mane, Salah and Shaqiri have afforded a number of younger players a chance to perform at first-team level during pre-season.
Harvey Elliott, who joined Liverpool from Fulham on Sunday, was the latest to do so against Napoli, and Robertson was impressed by the way the 16-year-old and his fellow youthful substitutes went about their task at Murrayfield.
“They’ve been great [throughout pre-season] and when young kids come in it’s a breath of fresh air sometimes,” the No.26 said.
“Harvey Elliott only signed this morning and he’s came on and done magnificent for 15 minutes. He’s only 16 years old and I think people forget that.
“Rhian’s had a great pre-season, Harry Wilson looked good when he came on today. Look, we need these players to push us and they need to push us in every single position and if they do that then the gaffer will give them the chance.
“Fair play to them, when they came on and we were all off then it did look better. I was watching and it looked a lot better than we felt in the first half so credit to them.
“But now it’s up to us to put in the performances, we’ve got one more game before it gets competitive and we need to get up to speed now.”
The Reds are now winless in their last four friendly outings, with Robertson eager to halt that sequence against Lyon before coming up against City.
“It wasn’t the best. Especially first half, the way we went about our business wasn’t good enough - I think we maybe got going five minutes before the end but other than that I think we were miles off it,” began the Scotland captain’s appraisal of the display in Edinburgh.
“Napoli outplayed us and outdone us, really, so it’s something that we’ll now need to look at because a week today our season starts and it doesn’t get any tougher than playing Man City. We need to be a hell of a lot better than we were today and that’s what this week coming up is for.
“When the season comes I’ve got no doubt that we’ll be ready, but we can’t get in the habit of losing or drawing because then it starts to sink in and you start getting used to it and that’s not what we need.
“So we need to start winning games: we’ve got a game Wednesday, hopefully we can get a result there, and then we go full throttle into the season and hopefully we have similar to last season.”
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