Liverpool ace Andy Robertson shows ‘immediate regret’ after slapping team-mate

LASK v Liverpool: Pictures

Liverpool star Andy Robertson showed immediate regret after slapping his team-mate Ben Doak in training ahead of the Reds’ Europa League clash with LASK on Thursday. Jurgen Klopp’s side opened their European campaign with a 3-1 victory against their Austrian rivals to storm to the top of the Group E table.

Robertson has been a key player for Liverpool since moving to the club from Hull in 2017 and has been named in the Reds’ starting line-up for all five of their Premier League encounters this campaign. But the 29-year-old was an unused substitute for the clash with LASK, with Kostas Tsimikas coming in to replace him. And one incident ahead of the match failed to go under the radar after it was caught on camera.

In the footage, Robertson can be seen joking around with his team-mates and strokes the back of Harvey Elliott’s neck. But the left-back then turns to Doak and gives the 17-year-old a cheeky slap on the face.

Robertson is surprised by the force of his slap as his jaw drops open in shock. And he immediately apologises to his compatriot. “Oh, sorry pal. You good?” says the defender as other players are left bewildered.

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The incident didn’t appear to dampen the mood in the Liverpool camp, with the Reds coming from behind to defeat LASK in their first Europa League match since their defeat to Sevilla in the 2016 final.

Doak was handed his first ever Liverpool start in the encounter as he lined-up in a front three alongside Darwin Nunez and Luis Diaz. Florian Flecker opened the scoring for the hosts after 14 minutes as he fired in from the edge of the area, with Nunez drawing his side level from the penalty spot 11 minutes after the interval. Diaz nudged the Merseyside giants ahead, before second half substitute Mohamed Salah killed the game off in the closing stages.

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And Liverpool manager Klopp even singled Doak out in his assessment of the encounter. “If we would have used Ben Doak a little bit more often, given him the ball, I think he would have got the ball more times on the touchline and passed the ball inside or whatever,” the German explained after the match.

“I know how the world is and I know that people expect us to fly through this competition. It will not happen. It will not happen in the group stage, it will not happen in the knockout stage. It will not happen. We have to dig into it and that’s what we did. It was a massive learning curve tonight, the opponent suffered much less from the pitch than we did, which is a little bit normal because we had the ball more often. But besides that we had to get used to it. So we can learn so much.”

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