Socceroo star Harry Kewell has revealed he is still troubled by a chronic groin injury and has attacked those who criticise his sporadic output for Liverpool.

Kewell, who showed his best in the World Cup qualifier victory over Uruguay, says the injury which forced him to undergo hernia surgery in the off-season was lingering on.

"I have still got a long way to go to be fully fit," Kewell said.

"My groin is still giving me grief after all this time, but we are doing everything possible to combat the problem.

"I come in early every day before training to do the work that needs to be done on my groin and to allow me to train.

"We are working 24 hours a day seven days a week to try to correct the problem and hopefully one day we will have a breakthrough.

"At the moment I just have to grit my teeth and get on with it, but at least I'm playing again now."

Kewell was noticeably troubled by the injury in Liverpool's defeat in the final of the World Club Championship last weekend.

He played through the full 90 minutes, unlike the club's last big final when he was forced off in the first half of the Champions League decider.

That early withdrawal brought out the knives from Kewell's critics, who believed him too ready to concede to injury, but the Australian winger remains angered by that reaction, seven months later.

"My groin just snapped and I love it how people were criticising me straight away, saying my heart wasn't in it or I just wanted to go off," Kewell said in the Daily Mirror.

"I don't know what these people are actually thinking when they say these thing.

"Are they actually thinking at all?

"It was the biggest game of my life and there's no way I would have left the field if there had been any way, any way at all, that I could have kept going."

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