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Arsenal-Liverpool: Can Trent Alexander-Arnold Defend?

Is the Liverpool star a good defender? It depends on your evidence.

by · NY Times

The comedian Stewart Lee used to include, as part of his routine, a recollection of a conversation he once shared with a taxi driver.

The story, in his telling, went like this. The taxi driver was an unrepentant homophobe. To be gay, he believed, was immoral. Lee tried to point out that morality is not a fixed thing, that it shifts with time. As an example, he noted that many of our ideas of ethics can trace their roots to ancient Greece. And in ancient Greece, homosexual love was often venerated*, not abhorred.

The taxi driver listened, absorbed what Lee was telling him, and then said: “Well, you can prove anything with facts.” Lee recalled being struck dumb by what he regarded as “the most brilliant way to win an argument.”

With that in mind, here are two facts. Few players in the Premier League are dribbled past more often than Trent Alexander-Arnold. So far this season, only six players have been beaten by an opponent in a one-on-one situation more often than Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool’s right back, according to data from Statsbomb. It happens roughly twice every three games, which admittedly does not seem like a lot, but still.

Inconveniently, Trent Alexander-Arnold is also one of the best players in the Premier League at winning the ball back in defensive positions. He is, according to the same Statsbomb database, ranked as the 20th-best outfield player for defensive regains. He does it only marginally less often than Emiliano Martínez, the Aston Villa goalkeeper. And Martínez can use his hands.

Both of these sets of facts are true. But only one of them has been used to build what is, now, an established consensus.

Everyone knows that Alexander-Arnold is among Liverpool’s most fearsome attacking weapons. Only 24 players in 30 years of Premier League history have created more goals. At age 26, Alexander-Arnold can already be regarded as the most creative defender the league has ever seen.

At the same time, though, it appears to have been agreed that Alexander-Arnold is not a good defender. The only matter up for debate appears to be quite what that means: whether he is merely average or whether he is actively bad.

Roy Keane, who appears to have a bee in his bonnet about this, cannot “believe how bad he is defensively.” Steve Nicol, once a Liverpool right back, argues that he is simply “poor.” Jamie Carragher, the tiptoeing liberal in this situation, tends to stick with the slightly enigmatic view that his “defending is not good enough.”

Those positions are effectively reinforced every week. Few players are analyzed in quite so much depth as Alexander-Arnold, a function not only of the profile of club he represents but the sense of unease he inspires.

He is a right back with the skill-set of an attacking midfielder. He is different, and new, and just a little confusing, and so his every performance is picked over with the fascination of an alien autopsy.

And every time he is beaten by an opponent — as he doubtless will be by Arsenal’s Gabriel Martinelli this weekend — his newest failure is added to the tally, held up as further incontrovertible proof of Alexander-Arnold’s shortcomings.

That view is now so ensconced, so potent, that even Alexander-Arnold seems to believe it. This summer, he told his new coach, Arne Slot, that he “would like to be the defender that no one wants to come up against in Europe.” He asked him to be “harsh” in his assessments of him.

“Any time an attacker gets past me, he will call it out in meetings, and individual meetings, and say this cannot happen,” he said. Player and coach have been undertaking long analysis sessions of the defender’s displays, poring over every error.

And yet there is the inconvenient matter of that second fact, the one that indicates Alexander-Arnold is one of the better defenders in the league for winning the ball back near his own goal, the one that rather contradicts the consensus view of his (lack of) defensive abilities.

That dichotomy — that both of these things can be held up as true — can be attributed to two things. The first is the danger of soccer’s relatively sudden desire to quantify everything without fully understanding what the raft of numbers the sport generates means. The figure that is so often used to damn Alexander-Arnold, the number of times a player is beaten on the dribble, is what analysts regard as a “counting statistic,” and a fairly basic one at that.

It exists, in other words, devoid of context. It is a raw number, out in the world alone. Often, it is not entirely clear what constitutes being “dribbled past.” Defenders have choices: They will sometimes allow an opponent to run away from them in order to retreat into a defensive shell. Knowing when not to engage is a skill, too.

More important, the statistic’s cold total does not tell you how many times that player was dribbled at during the course of a game. The same statistic is often used to illustrate the imperiousness of Alexander-Arnold’s captain, Virgil van Dijk. He is rarely dribbled past. But that is, at least in part, because he is dribbled at just as rarely.

Expressed as a percentage, Alexander-Arnold’s figures are not nearly so striking. It might be enough, then, to suggest that we should all accept that sometimes fullbacks are beaten by wingers, and that it should not be treated as some moral failure when it happens.

But even that does not take into account the other great caveat. Micah Richards, another player frequently told he was not an especially good right back, remembers going through newspaper reports of his performances early in his career rather more than was advisable, trying to find out what people thought of him.

He stopped only when, flicking through one paper, he saw he had been given just 6 out of 10 for his display one week. He had, the reporter noted, failed to offer much attacking threat. He had, in fact, “barely crossed the halfway line.” It seemed an odd criticism to Richards. His coach, Roberto Mancini, had expressly told him not to venture too far forward.

Alexander-Arnold has the opposite problem. He has played most of his career under strict instructions to become part of Liverpool’s attack. He is encouraged to drift into midfield, to find himself in positions in which he can hurt the opposition. That is how he became the most creative defender in the Premier League. It is what might yet earn him a move to Real Madrid.

But it has also meant that Alexander-Arnold is frequently criticized for being out of position. The reflex rebuttal is to suggest that he cannot be in two places at once, but even that is insufficient. Alexander-Arnold is not out of position. It is just, more often than not, that he has been told to be in a place we do not expect him to be. He is doing his job. His job just happens to involve more than just defending.

Still, the problem is that a consensus has taken hold about Alexander-Arnold, and it will not be denied, not by inconvenient evidence.

Thus far this season, Alexander-Arnold has roughly the same success rate at stopping one-on-ones as Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender. Walker, of course, is the player Alexander-Arnold is often told he should aspire to be. That might be true, but that’s the thing with facts: You can prove anything with them.

*I am compelled by the voices of those who had the misfortune of educating me to point out that this is probably an oversimplification. Different Greek cities had different moral codes at different times. In some of them, gender mattered less than class in determining which sexual relationships were considered permissible.

This Is All Fine

These have been a tough few months, by pretty much any measure, for the Premier League. It is currently considering how to rewrite some of its rules as a result of a fractious legal wrangle with its perennial champion. It is spending millions of dollars on lawyers’ fees to fight another court case against the same opponent.

The mood among its members may be as low as it has ever been, as the fragile balance of self-interests that has turned it into a behemoth comes undone amid endless infighting. One Premier League club has spent the last couple of years flirting with bankruptcy. Others seem committed to finding as many loopholes to exploit within the rules as possible.

The Premier League could, really, have two understandable reactions to the fact that the Football Governance Bill — a piece of legislation that includes the appointment of a regulatory body for soccer — is now in front of Britain’s lawmakers. One would be, essentially, “Yeah, O.K., fair enough.” The other can be boiled down to: “All help welcome.”

Instead, the league has chosen neither. The league greeted the bill’s publication by insisting that it was on board with some of its aims. “Strengthening fan engagement, protecting club heritage, preventing breakaway leagues, encouraging responsible ownership”: The Premier League is OK with all of that, although it is fair to assume it composed that list in ascending order of importance.

Mostly, though, the Premier League wanted to use this opportunity to stress that everything is fine, to perform the quite impressive trick of standing in front of a building that appears to be burning, smelling distinctly of smoke, and claiming that there is nothing to see here.

There must be, the league said, “appropriate checks and balances in the legislation to protect the hard-won position of English football, which is globally admired, a vital source of soft power and a driver of economic growth all over the country.”

Keeping things exactly the same is the Premier League’s priority. And that is why a regulator, a potent one, is so badly needed.

Messi Math

The key question, really, is this: Would winning the M.L.S. Supporters’ Shield — awarded to the team with the best regular-season record in the league, and therefore an achievement probably valued more highly in Europe than it might be in North America — have guaranteed a slot in the Club World Cup had it been won by the Columbus Crew, not Inter Miami?

The answer is, well, maybe. But also maybe not. It is hard to know: FIFA did not tell anyone that was the prize until Miami had won it, by eight points (or three wins). Only then was it announced that Inter Miami would be the host nation’s representative for the inaugural vision of Gianni Infantino’s brainchild next summer.

It would, of course, have made rather more sense to award that place to whoever won M.L.S. Cup — the league’s playoffs conclude with that game on Dec. 7, just a week after the Copa Libertadores final, which will also bring Club World Cup qualification for the victor — but it is not wholly absurd to reward the most consistent team over the course of the M.L.S. campaign.

The optics are the problem. It does, after all, look just a little like FIFA was determined to have Lionel Messi, Luis Suárez, Jordi Alba and Sergio Busquets take part in its jamboree, and that it has found a convenient excuse to ensure that happens.

That is FIFA’s prerogative, of course, but given that this tournament will only work if it is deemed legitimate it feels like a misstep. Fixing things so the most glamorous team in M.L.S. can be there does feel like the sort of thing that is more suited to a postseason roadshow than a serious contest concerned only with sports.

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