Arne Slot believes Andy Robertson is paying a price for playing with injury last season but insists he has no doubt the left-back will recapture his flying form for Liverpool.
The Scotland captain has had a difficult start to the season by his lofty standards, with Arsenal and Chelsea prospering down his flank in Liverpool’s past two Premier League games. Slot remains relaxed about the 30-year-old’s form, however. Robertson sustained a serious ankle injury on international duty in March but continued to play through the pain as Liverpool chased a quadruple and Scotland competed in the European Championship.
He missed most of Slot’s inaugural pre-season as a consequence, including the head coach’s first games, on tour in the United States, leaving him playing catchup physically and tactically.
Slot said: “I think his current situation is what you can expect if a player misses out on pre-season and a new manager comes in – you miss quite a lot. You have to go into a programme where you’ve missed the base tactically, when it comes to us [a new management team], and physically as well.
“Then, when you start to play, maybe he thinks a bit too much because there are not many things different but in some situations we ask for a bit different positioning from a left-back. For me, he is a bit in that period of time where he is thinking: ‘OK, I’m here now, should I be here or there?’ The moment he stops thinking but is just acting on what we expect he will be fine. That, combined with the fact that Robbo has always been a great player for this club especially because he went up and down, up and down all the time. Therefore he needs to have some time because he missed out on pre-season to come back to that up-and-down, up-and-down full-back. I see him getting there more and more; that’s the good thing.”
Robertson has started 10 of Liverpool’s 14 games despite the injury hangover and Kostas Tsimikas’s encouraging form, including the past two, at Brighton and Arsenal. There may be another change at left-back when Liverpool face Brighton again in the Premier League on Saturday, with Slot concerned about the demands of playing three games in one week.
“It’s not that big of a surprise that he’s not playing all of the games because I think he was only on the pitch three or four days before he played the second friendly in our stadium [against Las Palmas on 11 August],” he said.
“We started rotating from the start a bit because if a player didn’t have any pre-season there was no time to bring him to a situation where he could play three games in a row. We try to build up players for that programme. That’s his situation and it was good for him to play against Arsenal and Brighton to make sure he’s getting into the rhythm of playing twice a week.”
