Andy Robertson remembers vomiting the first time he ever did the lactate test. He was 23 years old, had just arrived from Hull and considered himself in pretty good shape. Until, that is, he was made to run Jürgen Klopp’s sadistic pre-season gauntlet for the first time.
Basically, you do laps of the training pitch. The required pace gradually quickens, in the manner of a bleep test. Unlike in a bleep test, however, at regular intervals a member of Klopp’s medical staff will come over, puncture your ear and – ew – extract a sample of blood from it. High lactate levels indicate fatigue; too high and you’re done. Pretty soon Robertson was feeling queasy. He started gagging. Full discharge followed soon after. It may not surprise you to know that James Milner won the Melwood lactate test eight years running.
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The lactate test went with Klopp, but last summer the German’s replacement, Arne Slot, and his physical guru, Ruben Peeters, replaced it with something less auricularly intrusive but just as gruelling: the six-minute race test. Six minutes of full-pelt running around the pitches, in scorching heat, with no breaks. “Give everything you have for these six minutes,” Slot orders. This pre-season, a 32-year-old Mohamed Salah destroyed all comers.
Liverpool’s annual orgy of summer suffering, originally under Klopp and now under Slot, has long held quasi-mythical status. “Pre-season is hard everywhere, but I never had three training sessions a day before in my life,” Dominik Szoboszlai bewailed of his first hazing after moving from RB Leipzig. And, of course, as both coaches understood, there was always more to this physical beasting than simply measuring VO2 levels.
For it is these moments – long before the start of the season and out of the public eye – that also forge character. That bond teams. It is no coincidence that Slot makes his players do the six-minute challenge in groups rather than individually. Something in shared agony seems to tie them closer. This is hell, but we’re in hell together. As the last seconds of the six minutes tick away, Slot’s charges collapse to the turf in pure exhaustion, but also a kind of euphoria: an emotional link that will sustain them through the long winter months.
Anyway, Federico Chiesa missed all this. It wasn’t his fault. He signed from Juventus for £10m right at the end of the window in August, missed the start of the season, missed the friendly tour, the bonding sessions, the card games on the plane, the visit to the Rocky steps in Philadelphia. He missed the tactical drills, the chance to find his place in the system. And, of course, he missed the six-minute race test.
Even in a profession obsessed by small details, Slot seems to dwell on this stuff longer than most: chemistry, team-building, how to think as a collective. One of his first moves as Liverpool manager was to institute a compulsory team breakfast. Team meetings are held almost on a daily basis, rather than weekly under Klopp.
This past week Slot was asked how his side has managed to improve as the season goes on, from an already impressive start. “The more meetings you have, the more training sessions you have, the better they know what they have to expect from each other,” Slot replied.
And, of course, when your team are six points clear in the Premier League and your personal brand is impeccable, you can say pretty much whatever you want. By way of contrast, imagine the snorts of derision if Gary O’Neil, say, had insisted the secret to unlocking success on the pitch was having as many team meetings as possible.
But when you are winning, every sentence you utter is a golden nugget of wisdom, every decision a stroke of genius, even the accidental decisions, even the ones that aren’t even really decisions. Ryan Gravenberch in midfield: a revelation, a masterstroke, and let’s not dwell too hard on the fact Liverpool spent most of the summer trying to upgrade him to Martín Zubimendi.
In this category you might also slot Chiesa. For most of the season, Liverpool’s only signing of Slot’s first transfer window looked predestined to join a long list – Alberto Aquilani, Fabio Borini, Mario Balotelli, Andrea Dossena – of Italian players who mysteriously never really did it at Liverpool. He’s played only 25 minutes in the Premier League in three substitute appearances.
Naturally there was some interest from the Saudi Pro League in January, some idle talk of a loan move. Italian newspapers churn out plaintive pieces lamenting his fate. Juventus fans under his Instagram posts beg him to come home. The national team coach, Luciano Spalletti, urged him to return to Serie A – a little ominously – “so I could keep him under observation”.
On the face of things, Chiesa’s prolonged absence has felt a little strange – even when you take into account his lack of a pre-season, the sparkling form of Salah in his favoured right-wing position. Yes, there have been niggling injuries in the autumn, but he’s still mostly been available. Yes, Liverpool are playing brilliantly, but four competitions offers plenty of scope for rotation. Yes, he came into the campaign undercooked. But it’s been more than five months and he’s still not even making league squads. Just how much pre-season does this guy still need?
The answer, counterintuitively, lies on the pitch. In a league where the dominant tactical note is increasingly a kind of rampaging chaos, Slot’s Liverpool play complex, refined passing football: intricate rehearsed combinations, movement choreographed and drilled in painstaking detail, decision trees upon decision trees.
This is what all the meetings were for. This is why Slot mapped out those first weeks so meticulously. Because this is not the kind of football where you can just plug in and play. Of course this was often the case under Klopp, too: Szoboszlai and Alexis Mac Allister previously arrived in early summer and integrated fairly smoothly. Gravenberch and Cody Gakpo, both mid-season signings, took months to get going. The less said about Arthur Melo, the better.
Frozen out by Thiago Motta at Juventus and now arriving at Melwood with no training block under his belt, Chiesa found himself, as Slot put it, “left behind”. The step up in intensity from Serie A to the Premier League also created its own challenges. And as the months rolled away, it was possible to view the Chiesa signing as a kind of misplaced opportunism, a bargain for the sake of a bargain, the footballing equivalent of those ready meals with a yellow sticker in the supermarket. You don’t strictly need it. But how wrong can a 39p beef rendang really go?
For all his setbacks, this is still a player with a considerable upside: verve and flair, searing acceleration, the ability to take defenders out of the game. As Spalletti puts it: “There aren’t many players who are capable of looking you in the eye and breaking through defensive lines one on one.” And – whisper it – in recent weeks, Chiesa has been showing tantalising glimpses of the player who lit up Euro 2020.
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His first goal came off the bench against Accrington Stanley in the third round of the FA Cup. Then followed a full 90 minutes against PSV in the Champions League, a 3-2 defeat from which he still emerged with a great deal of credit, creating both goals for Gakpo and Harvey Elliott. It was his first full 90 minutes since Euro 2024. A trip to Plymouth on Sunday afternoon should offer another opportunity for minutes.
And through it all, despite barely touching a football pitch, Chiesa has quietly charmed the fanbase. It helps that he is so clearly delighted to be there, already fluent in English, utterly transfixed by the Liverpool aura, the Anfield roar, the chance to scale the biggest pinnacles in the sport. It helps too that he has avoided the temptation to sulk or brood, has been happy to wait for his chances and smile through his frustration.
Now, perhaps, Chiesa’s moment may be close. The second half of Liverpool’s season will stretch their resources to the limit. A potential 28 games remain, and Salah will not be able to play them all, and nor will anybody. Chiesa may not be a regular starter, and he may not be the heir to Salah, but he will certainly be needed: perhaps as an impact substitute, perhaps as a locksmith against lower-block sides, perhaps even as a modern-day Divock Origi, the man who just pops up with the memorable goal when it is required.
Perhaps the defining theme of Slot’s time at Liverpool so far has been patience: patience on the ball, patience from fans and the club hierarchy, the patience required to stare a record-tying 20th league title in the eye and not to snatch at it. The patience to make only one summer signing, keep him out of the team for five months so he can do shuttle runs, and then unleash him fresh for the run-in. A shrewd stratagem, or simply a happy alignment of circumstances? When you’re in Liverpool’s position, it scarcely matters.
