Adam Lallana: Inside the body and mind of a Liverpool player - the legs

“Different positions on the pitch can demand different amounts of work…”

If you’re an attacker, it’s probably different to if you’re a defender, but going twice in 44 hours at the start of the year was physically demanding on us all. We’d all mentally prepared ourselves for it and we knew what we had to put ourselves through. We did it as a team and I thought we were unlucky not to get a win at Sunderland. We were proud of what we did and it was the first time the manager had experienced something like that. For myself, I’ve been involved in schedules like that a few times before in League One and the Championship. I probably didn’t appreciate how important the nutritional side of the game was in order to perform twice in two days back then, but this time around I was more aware. I’d learned more about my body and I knew I had to eat – and keep eating and keep eating – even if I wasn’t hungry, to help myself as much as I could.

“Your mentality can have a positive impact on your stamina…”

How did I run more at Sunderland than against Manchester City? It’s just the mental side of it, probably. I went into that Sunderland game knowing I was ready to play – we all did, it wasn’t just myself. The manager said to us on the morning that we were physically ready for that battle – and we showed we were. Yes, we didn’t get the result but that isn’t because we weren’t physically ready for it. On another day we could have won.

“I know there used to be a perception that I could only play for an hour…”

I remember when people were asking similar questions in Mauricio Pochettino’s first year at Southampton. When he came in, I had a very stop-start season due to injuries and I’d come off a lot in games. I was disappointed at the time for coming off, but I remember never speaking to the manager about it – I had too much respect for him to speak to him about it, so I just let him do his job because maybe he knew more about my fitness than me. He was probably seeing the stats, or knew I’d been injured here and there. He maybe saw stats that I was tailing off at the end of games, so he would protect me and bring me off. Who knows? That’s why we have managers. I am not one to come in and say ‘I am this fit or that fit’ or ‘I should be playing games here and there’. It was the same for me under Brendan [Rodgers] and now it’s the same under the current manager. If I get brought off after an hour or at half-time, whenever, it really isn’t my decision to make. It’s possible I may be fitter now than what I was a year ago, who knows? I am just doing what I get told to training-wise and we’re a fit team, it’s not just myself. We do run a lot and a lot of the time we do run more than the opposition – maybe that coincides with the manager’s style of play. It’s probably a side of my game I’ve had to adapt, but that’s from learning from him.