Roy Hodgson has assured Alberto Aquilani that he still has a golden opportunity to show he can play a successful role in the new Anfield era despite his injury jinx striking again.
The Italian’s first season on Merseyside was a huge anti-climax, with a succession of injuries and two debilitating viruses preventing him from showing his best form.
And frustratingly for Aquilani he has picked up a knock that has required him to leave Liverpool’s Swiss training camp and ruled him out of this afternoon’s friendly with Kaiserslautern in Germany.
Though there were a couple of highlights, namely goals against Atletico Madrid and Portsmouth, Aquilani never engaged top gear last season and some wondered whether Liverpool would offload him.
Hodgson, however, has made it clear that will not be the case and the manager is looking forward to working with Aquilani and coaxing the kind of form out of him that he used to show so regularly for AS Roma.
“There has never been any question about Alberto’s talents,” Hodgson insisted. “It is obvious for all to see that he is a gifted footballer.
“What has been the major disappointment for him is that he arrived here with an injury that took an awfully long time to clear up.
“It was only really towards the end of the season when he started to show anything like the kind of form you would have expected from the outset and that will have frustrated him.
“He has got to use this pre-season to put all those disappointments behind him and get his confidence up but what I have seen during the last three weeks has been encouraging.
“You can see every day he is working hard to improve his fitness. He clearly wants to get back to the levels he was showing before he came here and that is a positive sign.”
As encouraging as that appraisal might be, there is no doubt Aquilani still has to prove he can cope with the physical demands of the Premier League. During the game with FC Grasshopper in Zug, the £17m man seemed to lose confidence for a spell after being on the receiving end of a heavy tackle and eventually faded.
Hodgson, though, has put the performance into perspective, as he revealed Aquilani is trying hard to build himself up and has been encouraged by what he has seen.
“We have to remember that it is going to take some time to get to where we want him,” said Hodgson. “We must not ask too much from him too soon.
“I would rather be putting him on the field and taking him off too early rather than keeping him on five or 10 minutes too long, which would mean he misses a training session in the future.
“We have done a lot of tactical work but most of the work that we have been doing has been with the Australian fitness people. We are really only scratching the surface.
“But in that scratching the surface, Alberto has come out of it very well, as has Lucas, who is really the only person who can say he is a genuine Liverpool regular.”
No comments:
Post a Comment