Trent Alexander-Arnold’s horror show against Manchester United has seen him come under heavy criticism, so what’s next for him at Liverpool?
WELL, we didn’t lose any ground at the weekend.
There’s a highlight.
That and Alexis Mac Allister.
We’re lucky that this isn’t a season where only perfection can guarantee us the league. Arsenal will lose more points, Chelsea will lose more points, Manchester City may have already lost too many points and Liverpool, though the best team in the league, are imperfect too. This may not be the cakewalk some had envisaged.
The Manchester United game simply wasn’t good enough. The Reds looked like we weren’t expecting opponent effort in the middle third and it showed. Not many players could walk off the pitch with pride other than Alexis Mac Allister, Virgil van Dijk, Mo Salah and the goalkeeper.
You can look at the weather conditions, but United played too and did alright with it. We were the ones who feared the worst.
The news week has been dominated by one player who should have left the pitch first. Even a man of Trent Alexander-Arnold’s confidence would admit that he had a howler on Sunday. He couldn’t have picked a worse time.
There are two worlds to exist in here. Firstly, it’s important to recognise that Trent Alexander-Arnold is Liverpool’s man. A local lad who has taken the right-back role and redefined it for a generation.
As recently as last week, he scored and assisted for Liverpool. He’s won every single honour in the game while wearing our badge. We defend him because he’s ours. That may change but as things stand, Trent Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool’s vice-captain, plays for us and deserves support for that.
But he absolutely stank the ground out in the one fixture where you can’t knock off. Alright, he wasn’t alone in that — both Andy Robertson and Darwin Nunez performed two of the stupidest fouls I’ve ever seen, albeit for different reasons, while Curtis Jones won’t look back at the game with any sense of satisfaction — but with Trent it was more marked.
You don’t give the ball away 25 times in a game while playing for Liverpool and you definitely don’t do it against Manchester United. Irritatingly, I thought their full-backs, along with Fernandes, played well, but, arguably, they didn’t need to.
It’s OK to be irritated by Trent and still love him. That love will go with him all the way till he wears a different shirt. Then he can sod off. A smattering of applause when he plays in a Legends game in the future. Sorry, but he knows the rules.
For now, though? He wears this one, so he’s our lad.
We’ve all seen bad games before. Flanagan at Blackburn, Lovren at Spurs and Mac Allister at Wolves last season spring to mind. They’re ones where nothing can possibly go right with every pass under or overhit, runners coming at you from all over the place and every minute worse than the last. Premier League football has no place for a five-minute breather to sort your head out, so all he could do was lumber from one awful passage of play to the next.
What’s so astonishing is that his manager kept him on for so long. It seemed almost cruel at times. He didn’t help him at all there. Or us.
Arne Slot says his performance had nothing to do with the contract stuff, but you could see the terror on his face. ‘With the week I’ve had I can’t turn out a stinker here,’ followed by exactly that. A snowball effect. Ironically.
If this is the last six months of Trent’s Anfield career, I’d like to see him at his best, not with his head burnt out. This shouldn’t be a campaign because of that game. Get over it. Have Accrington off and take the family to Pontins till your head’s right, lad. We can’t change the United game, only learn from it.
Give Forest hell, Trent. Absolute hell. I think he will too.
He may not be ours for much longer, but while he’s here he gets that support. And there’s no way I was thinking that yesterday afternoon. Time and context helps. And a bit of hypocrisy.
We didn’t lose any ground at the weekend. There’s a highlight. That and the United lad falling on his arse on the snow. That was great.
Start again and do better.
