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Andre Wisdom is enjoying his football again after some video nasties at the start of the season wiped the smile from his face.

And Alan Irvine is convinced the loanee will return to Liverpool a better player than when he arrived in the summer.

“I think overall Andre’s done really well,” said Irvine.

“I think he’s going to go back to Liverpool a much better player for the experience of being here.

“That isn’t saying lets pat everybody who works with him on the back by any means. It’s the fact that he’s had games at this level week in and week out.

“He’s played against Eden Hazard, Alexis Sanchez and Santi Cazorla and those are the difficult games. They’re probably going to give a few people difficult games and he’s done really well so far this season.

“I’m really pleased with him. I think it’s been a really good bit of recruitment by the club.”

Irvine admits Wisdom’s game has come on a bundle after a tricky start to the campaign.

“He’s got used to the way we work. We do a lot of video work with players after games.

“I think probably at the beginning, he thought I’m getting criticised here but he realises it’s constructive criticism and he’s right into it now.

“It’s not a case of showing a whole load of things that are wrong. The best video clips are the ones where you’re saying ‘well done - that’s exactly what we want’.

“You’d much rather be told ‘have a look at this, this is brilliant’ than ‘have a look at this, it wasn’t very good’.

“When you’ve got that kind of feedback going on you’ll find that the player actually starts to take charge of it and think ‘I shouldn’t have been there’.

“You’re talking about just two steps at times but that makes all the difference between you being in the right position and the wrong position.”

Wisdom’s positional sense has improved on the back of in-depth video analysis.

“It’s not black and white. Probably the best analogy I can give is I watch young centre backs and they’re always at a stretch.

“They’re always having that last ditch slide tackle where all the crowd get up and go isn’t that fantastic, what a player he is. Then you’ve got this older guy standing beside him who never gets his shorts dirty because he stands in the right place! We had that for years with Joseph Yobo and then David Weir and Alan Stubbs.

“Joseph came off and his shorts were absolutely filthy and he was rapid and Stubbsy and David Weir couldn’t run and they were never mucky.

“It was just they stood in the right places. So these little details that you pick up through the games and through the video work and so on make you become a much better defender.

“So that’s why I feel he’ll go back to Liverpool a much better player than he would have been if he hadn’t gone on loan.”