BEFORE anyone says ‘it was only Wrexham in the first of week of July’ remember this – Jermaine Pennant can perform on the big stage too.

It’s easy to forget that he was Liverpool’s man of the match in their last competitive game, his sterling efforts in the Champion’s League final quickly eclipsed by the result and Rafael Benitez’s instant demands for upheaval.

But after he stole the show in the far more low-key surroundings of the Racecourse Ground, it became obvious that the first-half havoc Pennant caused Milan’s ageing back four just hours before that emotion-fuelled press conference in May is still safely stored in his manager’s memory bank.

That performance, however, doesn’t seem to have spared the winger being part of his overhaul – just this week Benitez announced that wide men are still his priority.

Yet on Saturday Pennant served a quick reminder that he’s ready to pick up where he left off from that long overdue starring role in Athens.

Like the vast majority who were involved in Saturday’s opening pre-season friendly at Wrexham, Pennant only played 45 minutes but he crammed more into his than everyone else aside from hat-trick hero Besian Idrizaj.

The 19-year-old Austrian still had Pennant to thank for all three of his first-half strikes however, the pace and uncanny knack to squeeze in a cross under pressure coming to the fore in fine style.

Benitez does, of course, need wide cover because Pennant remains the only natural winger, certainly on the right-hand side, in the senior squad and it’s no disgrace to him that the manager is keen to furnish the flanks with more quality. But if that policy is Benitez’s idea of a kick up the backside for the £5.5million signing from Birmingham last summer, then he certainly got up off it and went to work on Saturday. All three Liverpool goals came in a 19-minute spell in a first half that was the only worthwhile 45 minutes of action in this all-too-early resumption of the football season.

Wimbledon was still going on, the Summer Pops are in full swing and there’s not even been a heatwave to indicate that summer has arrived.

And yet all that didn’t matter to a crowd that gave Wrexham their second successive five-figure attendance in succession – the first, at the end of last season, was only because defeat would have meant it being a historic last league game.

Perhaps this lowly status of their opponents means that whatever happened would have been somewhat irrelevant and the overall analysis would tell Benitez little with five weeks still to go to the Premiership kick-off.

Indeed, the second half was only useful as an indicator that the junior Anfield contingent – many fresh from FA Youth Cup glory – aren’t quite ready to graduate to big school yet given their rather timid 2-0 loss in this period.

And it was only really the performances of Pennant and Idrizaj that promoted the game to the tier above training ground kick-about.

First-team experience was rare in Benitez’s opening line-up, non-existent with the exception of Moroccan Nabil El-Zhar in his second-half team sheet.

For Steve Finnan, Alvaro Arbeloa, Jack Hobbs and Gabriel Paletta it was a case of easing themselves back in gently, which is exactly what Wrexham’s toothless first-half forward line allowed them to do.

Of the other senior players who returned ahead of the international contingent, Momo Sissoko was the most recognisable but a lack of real midfield combat meant this wasn’t the battlefield for him to thrive on.