Feature Interview: Livramento's road to recovery

The mind immediately begins to worry. Has he had another setback? When he re-emerges to sit down and chat, he brushes off the knock. “It’s nothing,” he shrugs. In the grand scheme of the last 13 months, Livramento’s pain threshold has increased as much as his diligence to ensure every niggle is addressed. Nothing is left to chance.

Sure enough, he makes his long-awaited return four days later, pain free, for the trip to Brighton.

It had to be Brighton, of course, the scene of the crime as Saints were robbed of their brightest young talent and Livramento of a second season in the Premier League.

It’s all water under the bridge now as far as the defender is concerned. He attaches no emotional baggage to the setting of his comeback, and can even laugh about the fact he nearly scored 20 minutes before his world turned upside down at the Amex Stadium in April last year. Football, eh?

It was one of those innocuous ones that so often cause the most damage. Forcing Enock Mwepu to dribble back towards his own goal, the Brighton man suddenly turned sharply to his right. As Livramento tried to match his movement, his knee buckled beneath him.

“It almost felt like the whole stadium went silent,” he remembers. “I just felt something, like a loud snap in my knee, and I went down and I could just tell straightaway it wasn’t nice.

“Obviously when the stretcher comes out and you get taken off, and you look at the replays and it doesn’t look very serious, it’s got to be something quite big. The action that I did it in was just a change of direction that a lot of people would do.”

Before long, his teammates were back in the dressing room for half time. Some went to check up on him, but Livramento felt isolated.

“It was probably the only game my family wasn’t at, throughout the whole season,” he reveals. “That was a little bit weird for me, because that was the first thing I wanted to do – I wanted to see my mum, I wanted to see my dad, because I knew it was something bad and I needed them there.

“But at the same time it was good for me to be on my own and really experience what it’s like to have something this bad happen, because I’d come in, played every game and had such a wonderful start – everything was going for me – and then instantly, boom, it just felt like everything went against me. I didn’t understand why it happened to me.”

Livramento lies prone on the turf having suffered an ACL injury that would keep him sidelined for 13 months. (Photo credit: Robin Jones)

To offer some perspective, the elusive Mwepu was forced to retire six months later following the discovery of a hereditary heart condition. It could’ve been worse, but Tino’s time was tough enough.

His debut season, for nine of its ten months, was a roaring success. The Brighton game was Saints’ 34th Premier League match of the campaign, of which Livramento played in 28 of them.

Such was his impact, Kyle Walker-Peters, capped by England that season at right-back, spent much of the year on the left to accommodate the former Chelsea teenager.

“I didn’t expect to play that much – I’ve said that pretty much every time,” Livramento, now 20, reflects. “But obviously the manager and the club showed a lot of faith in me.

“I was 18 when I first came and I was playing straightaway in the Premier League. It was something you dream of, so obviously I was very happy, very excited.

“At the start, I almost didn’t really think about the result or anything, I was just in awe of playing, being in training and seeing all the players here, and coming up to a Saturday.

“I remember playing my first game at home against Man United, playing against players like Pogba, Martial, playing people like that.”

It was in that game that Livramento announced himself to the St Mary’s crowd with a powerful run down the wing, accelerating away from Fred, shrugging the Brazilian to the floor and crossing dangerously into the box at the end of a 70-yard burst – the sort of surge that soon became his trademark, cementing his status as a fan favourite from the start.

“After four or five games of being in that zone, you kind of think, ‘ok, this is the business’,” he explains. “Coming from a league of under-23s where, yeah winning matters, but you’re in the Premier League now – you’re playing for three points every week. You just get into that mindset of ‘this is your job now’.

“I guess at the start no one really knew who I was, so they would all see my name in the starting line-up and think, ‘who is he?’ I was kind of just carrying that as an advantage, to just go out there and play my game.”

Livramento leaves Fred in his wake on his home debut against Manchester United in August 2021. (Photo credit: Chris Moorhouse)

It worked. Livramento, together with former Chelsea teammate Armando Broja, helped Saints occupy a place in the Premier League’s top ten until April, only for the season to fizzle out in the last two months, not helped by the absence of their influential full-back.

Perhaps Livramento and Broja paved the way for similar signings to follow, including four from Manchester City last summer, as Saints targeted another of Europe’s elite academies.

One of the new recruits, Roméo Lavia, Livramento describes as “one of the best players of the season”. The pair were already close, having been former rivals at youth level.

“I’ve got quite a few friends at Man City that are similar ages, and they would say, ‘we’ve got a new No 6 – be careful!’” Livramento grins.

“I would say, ‘yeah, whatever!’ but I remember we played them with a couple of first-team players and I thought, ‘we’re just going to smoke them’, but he was playing and he was unbelievable.

“Over the summer I would be texting him, asking him how he was, and then obviously he joined, and I was very happy with that.

“Obviously I haven’t played with him yet, but training with him, he’s just a different level. Hopefully, we’ve got two more games now, so who knows? I feel like there could be a chance.”

Livramento (left) and Roméo Lavia were already friends before the latter joined Saints last summer. (Photo credit: Matt Watson)

He was right. The pair did share a pitch for the first time as teammates, albeit briefly, following Livramento’s 77th-minute introduction at Brighton – the culmination of the toughest year of this most promising of careers.

“I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, but it’s definitely been a lot easier because of the people around me, and I can’t thank everyone here enough for what they’ve done,” he says, keen to namecheck Saints’ strength and conditioning coach, Bill Styles, and physio Fraser McKinney.

“The two people that I work with closely, obviously Bill and Fraser, I don’t know how they do that every day – being able to keep me motivated. I wouldn’t be anywhere near the physical and mental state I’m at now without those two, one hundred per cent.

“You question yourself a lot and you think, ‘will I ever be able to return to, or even be better than I was, physically, before the injury?’

“But it’s just all about believing. The coaches and the physios wouldn’t do these exercises with you if they knew it was going to injure you again.

“I feel like, physically, now I would say I’m in a better state than I was before the injury, so I feel like that’s the best thing that’s come from it.

“On the mental side, it’s a massive challenge, I’m not going to lie.” Good days and bad days? “Definitely. I hated when things would become monotonous.

“Always, every single time, they would always listen to me and obviously I’m very thankful for that, because it feels like they’re almost my friends, listening to what I want to do rather than me listening to them as coaches, and them forcing me to do something just because they know it’s good for me.”

When asked if there have been setbacks along the way, Livramento simply responds: “Loads.”

“No one really knows, but I tore my hamstring in January,” he reveals. “It was at a point where I feel like I would’ve probably played B team within a couple of weeks. God knows what would’ve happened after that, whether I would’ve been able to play first team, but I was in a place where I was confident of playing.

“I had surgery on that as well, so I’ve had two surgeries, been out for over a year and now I feel like I’m getting to the point that my body’s in the best shape it has been.

“That was the biggest setback I’ve had. If anything, it helped me. The extra two and a half months, taking it to a year, just gave me that extra security in my head, knowing that, ­‘ok, it’s been a year. It’s in a good place, I know it’s strong’.”

So many months dedicated to his recovery left Livramento unable to arrest Saints’ slide, as the club’s 11-year stay in the Premier League came to an end a fortnight ago.

Feeling helpless from the stands, now he hopes for a setback-free pre-season, to return in peak condition for the Championship promotion push.

“There’s no way Southampton should be in the Championship,” he shakes his head. “The fans don’t deserve to be supporting a club that’s in the Championship, but that’s the one thing that will never leave – the fans that support the club.

“We’re going to need them more than ever next season, because the Championship is not a forgiving league. You play so many games.

“The club’s been amazing with me, with everything they’ve done, and it’s not been a great season to not be a part of. I would’ve loved to be out there with the team, suffering every week, but at least I’d be out there and be able to have my opinion on what we should do.

Livramento won Terry Paine's President's Choice Award for his outstanding contribution last season. (Photo credit: Matt Watson)

“Seeing the team in the position they’re in has been, I feel like, even tougher for me, because I’ve been watching every game, I feel like I’ve almost come to understand the point of view of what a fan must feel like.

“It’s so hard to just watch and know that you can’t do anything to influence the game, but I feel like I’ve done everything, coming to most games to support the team, and for me it would just be nice to be able to come out at St Mary’s and get a few minutes – just to show the fans I can still play football!”

Having revisited the scene of his darkest hour that left him prostrate on the Brighton turf, it was just as fitting to see Livramento back at the place he left Fred on the seat of his pants.

Another 13-minute cameo – lucky for some – against Liverpool reminded those Saints fans not only what they’ve been missing, but what they have to look forward to in the shape of a fully-fit Livramento raiding the right flank.