Prepare for a game like Gini: The middle of the week
So, recovery is done and Liverpool are just days away from taking to the field again – but just how have training schedules and preparations changed from the players' perspective?
“By the time we reach the middle of the week, it’s all about looking to the next game…”
Of course, you will always look back at the last game as football players because you take the good things to give you confidence and the bad things to change them into good things. You want to learn from the mistakes you’ve made and you want to take the good things you did with you. I am always looking forward in life, but with a few things from the past that I can do better or take with me. Sometimes in training, you will look at things that maybe didn’t go so well in the previous game, so you’ll work on it to improve it and take it into the next game.
“We always train to do good things in the game at the weekend...”
If we can hurt a team with counter-pressing, for example, we’ll train all week on this. As soon as we begin training again after recovery, we will look forward and think about how we can hurt our opponent.
“I don’t tend to look at who I’ll be directly up against…”
Of course, you know the players because you’ll have played a lot against them, so you know how they play. If I don’t know a player, of course I try to look at how he plays beforehand, but the most important thing for me is trying to observe it in the game – what kind of moves he makes, what he is good at and so on. I try to learn quickly in the game if I don’t know the player.
“When we train, we give our all because we have to train ourselves also…”
The only time you can train yourself is when you give 100 per cent. That’s what the manager asks of us, so that’s what we do. He will make sure we have enough rest to rest our bodies to give 100 per cent again.
“Training here is quite intense because of the way we want to play…”
It’s intense and you have to be fit, otherwise you’re not going to play given the way we play with the counter-pressing and a lot of running, positional play and so on. You have to be fit and train hard to stay fit, otherwise you will find it difficult in games. It’s a good thing and I like to play like that with that dominance.
“We always respect the opposition in our preparations, but it’s about what we can do…”
That’s what the manager is always telling us. Of course, you have to be aware about the things the opponent can do well and the things we need to be ready for, but the manager says if we do all the things right, we can make them do those things they do well less. He always looks at us first before he looks at the opponents – that’s how I like it and that’s how it has to be when you play for a team like Liverpool. We play with a lot of good players here, so we must first look at our qualities and then the quality of the opponent.