Calvin Ramsay will reap the benefits of an early end to his 2022/23 season, according to Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp.
The right-back joined the Reds from Aberdeen last summer but has been hampered by injury since the move, playing most of his football in the youth ranks alongside two senior outings. There have still been positive moments this term like his debut for Steve Clarke's Scotland but his latest injury has saw him undergo surgery, ruled out for the rest of the season.
While it's no doubt another blow on top of an exceptionally unfortunate start to life at Anfield, Klopp insists the former Aberdeen star will feel the benefits of this in year to come. He said: "Obviously missing the rest of the season is serious, but with Calvin it’s really special. So, Calvin arrived here and had a back problem I never heard [about] before. It’s just that when you are in the growing process it can happen but he played all the games and didn’t really feel anything. Then he came here and we make a proper check and it’s like, ‘OK, needs something, we need to have a closer look.’
“So, he had no real pain or whatever but was not allowed to train for a long period because otherwise you can, for a young person who is still growing, you can create real problems in the long term. So, it was no chance.
"Coming back into a new team… I asked him when we spoke – when it was clear he has now the new injury I had him in my office – and I asked, ‘How often have you been your absolute best, yourself, pretty much?’ and he said, ‘Not often,’ and I say, ‘Never, not one day.’
“So, now we have to use that because we couldn’t. If you want to adapt to a new thing and can’t train for four months, stuff like this, it’s really tricky. He was always this step behind, now he has that injury and this season is over – even if you could come back a bit earlier, that makes no sense because now it is really to build the boy up physically and then to have a new start and we go again.
“We cannot play catch-up all the time with him because he is a great talent, a real talent, who had the most unlucky start possible. But in the end when he finishes his career at 36 or 37 or whatever, if he can say then, ‘The most difficult year of my career was the first’, or the second in his case maybe, that’s absolutely OK because all the others were better and we did the right things in the first two. So, that’s what we try to do now with him.”
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