Liverpool Under-21 manager Michael Beale is in a positive mood regarding his team’s start to pre-season, after a resounding 6-0 win over Waterford United last Friday evening at the RSC.
When asked whether he feels that these trips across the Irish Sea are very beneficial to the side, he told Extratime.ie: “These teams, their motivation to play Liverpool is huge; the teams are quite young; and they’re in the middle of their season – obviously we’ve only been back for five or six sessions.”
Beale also spoke about the upcoming pre-season matches, and what he feels is most important about the preparation period for the upcoming campaign, saying: “We go off next week and we play PSV and Porto’s B teams so the level of competition goes up very, very quickly. I think the most important thing for us coming away is to have the players in isolation for 10 days, that’s really important for us, you know, where we can spend a lot time – it’s a young group – and pull them together.”
Beale spoke highly of the abundance of talented players throughout the Under-21s squad, singling out Samed Yesil, as well as a few others.
Speaking of Yesil, who spend most of last season out injured, Beale said: “If he’s anywhere around the box the ball seems to fall for him and he scores. He’s like a magnet for the ball in the box. I thought he actually missed a couple tonight and he looked a bit frustrated but he keeps getting in there.”
He continued: “I think young Jack Dunn is a boy who was with our first team last pre-season, but got injured, and you see tonight he scored a goal and had two fantastic efforts in the first half. Jerome Sinclair obviously played at the end of last season, so you’ve got three really high-profile number-nines there, but obviously [Ex-Barcelona forward, Sergi] Canos and [Northern Ireland international, Ryan] McLaughlin are equally well known. We’ve got [a number of] good players – our captain in the second half, Cameron Brannagan, has been on the bench five times in the Premier League so the Waterford boys came up against good players tonight and, in the first half in particular, they made a game of it – a real game of it.”
Beale also spoke very highly of his players’ mentality, saying: “I’ve got to say that the attitude of our boys has been fantastic, the facility we’ve been using is excellent and we were probably over-ripe for this game really because we’ve been training double sessions, so they were probably a little bit tired going into the game. I thought overall it was a good performance, you [as a player] can’t get carried away because it was your first 45 minutes of the season so you know it’s not gonna be perfect before you play.”
He praised Ryan McLaughlin as well, giving encouraging words for the young Ulsterman, who will look to have a chance at breaking into the Liverpool first team this season:
“He is your modern-day attacking full-back, isn’t he?” said Beale. “His one-v-one defending is very good, I’ve just gotta make sure I give him enough challenge with this group, because he’s slightly older. So playing on the wing motivates him and tonight I thought he was very, very good, Ryan. He’s had two really hard years where he’s been injured but you can see when he’s in full flow like that he’s a very good player.”
Comments.
Loading comments…