Liverpool midfield player set to undergo surgery on his longstanding shoulder problem that will now see the Welshman miss the rest of the season.
SOURCE: The Guardian
This has not quite been the debut season at Anfield that midfield player Joe Allen would have dreamt about when he opted to pen to paper on a five-year contract with Premier League giants Liverpool last summer.
Allen was new Reds head coach Brendan Rodgers’s second new signing on Merseyside last summer after the arrival of front man Fabio Borini from AS Roma and the Northern Irishman really put his neck out on the line to bring the player to the club.
Rodgers of course knew the 23-year-old well from their time working together at the Liberty stadium, where Allen was one of his key performers, especially in his role as the central midfield passer in Rodger’s short-passing game that the South Wales outfit made their own in their first season back in the English top flight.
And so Rodgers forked out an eyebrow-raising £15million of Fenway Sports Group’s cash on a midfield player that he likened to FC Barcelona’s Spain international schemer Xavi Hernandez – a tough comparison for any player to live up to. The young Wales international has most certainly proved he is no Xavi based on his first season’s showing in a red shirt.
In fact, he is at present struggling to even live up to his own displays for the Swans in the last campaign, although news on Monday of the player’s long-running and debilitating shoulder problem must now put Allen’s struggles on Merseyside this season into proper context.
According to the club, the player first suffered a recurrence of the injury that has troubled him on and off for large parts of his fledging career last October, but he opted not to have a curing operation back them due to the fact that it would have resulted in him having to undergo a three-month injury layoff, which is encouraging for Liverpool fans to know he would give blood for the cause.
However, maybe in hindsight Allen should have taken the sensible option and had the surgery last year. Perhaps then we would now potentially be seeing the best of him in a Liverpool shirt, rather than the worst.
COMMENTS