You don’t want your players to come in and play catch-up at the start of a season and I think Rafael Benitez can count himself unlucky to have injury concerns before the campaign has even started.

The fact is Degen and San Jose are unproven and neither can deliver the kind of automatic reliability you got when you could bring Hyypia in to plug the gaps at the back.

But lets’s look at things positively. Benitez is currently going about solving his issues very well, especially in the case of Xabi Alonso.

I said here last week how important it was to get the cash in for the player as swiftly as possible and getting close to a conclusion of the deal with four weeks of the transfer window left is a good bit of business.

And one thing is also for certain – losing 3-0 to Espanyol in a pre-season friendly should not cause Benitez or anyone else sleepless nights.

I remember at Anfield that we always used to be notorious bad starters in the summer warm-ups - and the lads in the boot room couldn’t have given a monkey’s.

They might have given us stick for playing badly in a friendly but privately they’d be laughing about it.

They, like I’m sure Benitez is this week, were delighted we had been stopped from getting carried away and they knew that all the running we were doing chasing the ball was getting us primed for the important stuff.

Because a good competitive 90 minutes, even one when you lose 3-0, is worth far more than anything you can do in week on the training ground.

So Sunday night was great for everyone involved – and I feel a real setback for those who weren’t.

Mark Lawrenson was talking to NICK SMITH