Liverpool midfielder Gini Wijnaldum has revealed his expectations for next season now the new Premier League fixtures have been released.
The champions will begin the defence of their crown at home to newly-promoted Leeds United on the weekend of 12 September before travelling to Chelsea and then facing Arsenal, Aston Villa and Everton in a testing opening period of matches.
The 29-year-old 's Liverpool future has been the subject of some debate throughout the summer with him now in the final year of his Anfield contract - and the ECHO understanding no active talks are currently taking place.
The appointment of Dutch international manager Ronald Koeman as the new manager of Barcelona has led to rumours he may try to bring him to the Camp Nou.
Speculation also continues around the Reds and Bayern Munich midfielder Thiago Alcantara - and whether Liverpool could shift their transfer stance on the Spaniard if departures create gaps in the squad.
But Wijnaldum is firmly focused on talking about the Reds' prospects in the wake of the new fixtures dropping.
"Tough fixtures but we just have to get good results", he told Liverpoolfc.com.
"My first season when I came here it was also a tough start with three away games because the stadium was not ready – this is quite similar. We just have to see how it's going to look with supporters and all that.
"But in the Premier League all games are difficult, especially in the beginning because everyone is fresh. We just have to train good, trying to play the games as good as possible and prepare ourselves for the season.
"We don't know what we can expect. We know the fixtures and everything is tight and that you're going to play a lot games. But I think we will see how tough it is when we are in the situation, when you play game after game. Then we're going to see how tough it is.
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"But we dealt with that situation before in some periods in the season. We know how to deal with it but it's going to be difficult. Most periods of the season we're going to play a lot of games. We just have to deal with the situation.
"You just want to do as good as possible and I already said it in my previous interviews that you never know what you deal with during the season. I just hope we can deal with every situation we will get in and make it as good as last season."
Wijnaldum also spoke about the unusual nature of this shortened pre-season caused by the late end to the previous Covid-19 affected campaign and the tight turnaround ahead of the resumption of Premier League action in early September.
"Before, you had way more friendlies to get ready for the season. Now we have only two, so they're going to be really important", he explained.
"I think it is easier now than the previous training camps because we had just two weeks off now and before that it was like four weeks or more.
"I think this pre-season is less than the other ones in terms of intensity with running because there's a lot of football. We do it with pleasure because we know that we need it during the season.
"If you also look at the seasons before, you could see that we were fit until the end. So that was all because we had a good pre-season.
"We know how important it is for us also because we want to play high-intensity football and you have to be fit."
Wijnaldum and Liverpool are set to play their first pre-season friendly on Saturday when they take on German side Stuttgart in Austria on Saturday (5pm kick off) before playing RB Salzburg next Tuesday (3pm).
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