Liverpool defeated LASK in the Europa League on Thursday evening.
Liverpool star Andy Robertson showed immediate remorse after punching his teammate Ben Doak during training ahead of the Reds’ Europa League clash with LASK on Thursday.
Jurgen Klopp’s team opened their European campaign with a 3-1 win over their Austrian rivals to top Group E.
Robertson has been a key player for Liverpool since moving to the club from Hull in 2017 and has been included in the Reds’ starting line-up for all five Premier League matches this season. But the 29-year-old remained on the bench for the match against LASK, replaced by Kostas Tsimikas. And a pre-match incident went unnoticed after being filmed.
In the footage, Robertson can be seen joking with his teammates and stroking Harvey Elliott’s neck.
But then the left-back turns to Doak and gives the 17-year-old a cheeky slap.
Robertson is surprised by the force of his slap as his jaw drops in shock.
And he immediately apologizes to his compatriot.
“Oh, sorry, buddy.
Are you okay?” says the defender while the other players are confused.
The incident did not appear to dampen the mood in the Liverpool camp as the Reds came from behind to beat LASK in their first Europa League match since losing to Sevilla in the 2016 final.
Doak made his first ever start for Liverpool in this encounter, lining up alongside Darwin Nunez and Luis Diaz in the front three.
After 14 minutes, Florian Flecker scored the hosts’ first goal with a shot from the edge of the penalty area, and eleven minutes after the break, Nunez equalized from the penalty spot. Diaz put the Merseyside giants ahead before second-half substitute Mohamed Salah put an end to the game in the closing stages.
And Liverpool manager Klopp even singled out Doak in his assessment of the match. “If we had used Ben Doak a little more and given him the ball, I think he would have put the ball on the sidelines more often and passed it inside or something,” the German explained afterwards the game.
“I know what the world is like and I know people expect us to get through this competition.
It’s not going to happen.
This will not happen in the group stage, nor in the knockout stage.
It’s not going to happen.
We have to face it and we have. It was a huge learning experience tonight, the opponent suffered a lot less from the pitch than us, which is somewhat normal because we had the ball more often.
But otherwise, you had to get used to it.
We can learn so much this way.
