Andy Robertson missed our memorable victory over Ajax because of a knee injury sustained against Napoli and there has been some study into how much football he has played in the past few years.
As reported by Simon Hughes for The Athletic: ‘Robertson has played more than any other Liverpool player since 2018, having featured in 17,213 minutes of football.
‘Among 270 male footballers, Robertson averaged 122.7 hours break between appearances, the eighth-lowest in a sample that also assessed the number of “critical zone” matches — a reference to the number of times a player featured across consecutive fixtures without at least five days (or 120 hours) of rest separating them.
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‘The study found that 65.1 per cent of Robertson’s games over the past four years have been in the “critical zone”, with 19.5 per cent of games after less than three days’ respite’.
This is of course all testament to the reliability of our much-loved left-back and the calibre of football that we have been playing in the past four years but also quite alarming statistics.
The captain of Scotland has perhaps been long overdue an injury and this current spell on the sidelines may in fact do him some good, in the long-run.
There will be many pointing out that Kostas Tsimikas is a ready and more than able reserve when needed and it’s entirely possible that our No.26 has been playing whilst heavily fatigued this season, so far.
With such serious injury problems in our ranks at the moment, there needs to be some change for how much football we expect of footballers but money will always rule over player protection.
Statistics like this illustrate why we have such injury issues but also why Jurgen Klopp is so often talking about schedules and fixture loading – although rivals supporters rarely listen to the sense that he so often talks.