With 67 minutes gone at a breezy Etihad Stadium, on an afternoon that seesawed like a listing ship on a spring tide, Trent Alexander-Arnold could be seen twirling and jinking high up the pitch on the Liverpool right flank, a place he occupied for much of the afternoon.
Eventually his cross was cut out by a City foot. Kevin De Bruyne, who produced the perfect through pass for Raheem Sterling to skitter away upfield.
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Sterling ran the length of Liverpool’s right flank, then stopped, twirled, stopped again, crowded out now by two red shirts. One of these was Alexander-Arnold himself, loping back in that dogged style, with the air even at top speed of a man trotting along the beach with a surf board under one arm. As the ball trickled out of play Alexander-Arnold bent double and clutched his knees, chest heaving, the end of just another instalment in his own thrillingly high-stakes game of risk and reward.
By the end of this 2-2 draw Liverpool’s right-sided defensive playmaker had made a goal, almost made quite a few others, passed the ball with wonderful elan, and resembled at other times an open wound on the right, isolated by a well-executed plan from Pep Guardiola.
No doubt the entire Alexander-Arnold methodology will be pored over once again. It has become a truism to mutter darkly about his defending, as though in allowing this monster, this defensive refusenik to even take the field Jürgen Klopp is somehow revealing to the world his blindness, his tactical illiteracy.
The internet says Alexander‑Arnold can’t defend – and not just that he can’t defend, that his defending is a kind of outrage, a societal toxin. The truth is not just in the middle, but a great deal more interesting. How do you solve a problem like Trent? The answer to this is a blank look, a shrug. What problem, exactly, are we talking about?
Better, perhaps, to imagine a Liverpool team where the right‑back sits, covers and blocks up the space. Because the current one, that era-forging Klopp machine, is built to a startling degree around that balance of risk and creativity on the right. It was all on show here in a beautifully open, beautifully flawed game of elite club football, which seemed to centre in so many ways around Liverpool’s right-back.
View image in fullscreenAlexander-Arnold and Pep Guardiola share a moment during the game. Photograph: Andrew Yates/EPA
Guardiola deserves credit for taking the game that way. Here City’s manager was up in the first minute prowling his chalk rectangle, discarding his quilted Dalek coat, all the better to revolve his arms in a series of strange geometric shapes, seeing space, angles, intersections, a man trying to grasp the day in his hands.
From those early moments City did something simple, playing a series of long, flat, diagonal passes into the space behind Liverpool’s full-backs. By half-time the back four had produced 18 of these. Both City’s first-half goals had come from swift lateral movements, finding that loose, undefined space in the lines between centre-half and full-back. By the end City had made enough chances this way to win the game quite comfortably with competent finishing.
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They should have scored via this route with four minutes gone, then took the lead moments later, De Bruyne’s shot taking a deflection off Joël Matip. It took 10 minutes for Liverpool to equalise. It was a lovely goal made by Andy Robertson’s delightful chipped pass to the back post, where Alexander-Arnold was in place to provide a velum-bound, goose feather-stuffed touch-off into the path of Diogo Jota, who just had to ease it into the net.
It was a finely worked goal. And more than that a moment of pure, luminous Liverpool full-back‑ism, a kind of manifesto goal, a moment that said, yes, we really are going to keep doing this, being entirely ourselves, overloading our own strengths, daring you to plug at our weaknesses.
By half-time Liverpool were 2-1 down. City’s passing and movement was thrillingly precise. Close to the pitch you could hear the clips and thuds and pings, like the comforting rat-a-tat of an electric sewing machine stitching the game, the day into place.
How to respond, how to close that space on the flanks? How to protect those ailing full-backs? The most interesting part of the game was Klopp’s response. Which was to do: nothing. In fact, to ask for more: more aggression, more vertigo, more and better high-risk full-back play.
Less than a minute into the second half Alexander-Arnold was already high up the pitch, funnelling the ball on in one movement to find Mo Salah in space. His cross was pinged high into the net by Sadio Mané.
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Three times in that second half Alexander-Arnold was the furthest man forward for Liverpool. Just as many he was back covering in extremis. No doubt there will be damning video segments in the post-match playbook, the spotlight of doom.
This is of course his role, to move forward, to provide the point of difference, the one real anomaly in this brilliantly constructed systems-team. That looseness is written into his game, not just the freedom, but the obligation to act as a playmaker, a roving brain, a note of creative imagination.
Afternoons like this present the paradox of Trent: a player so unusual, so sui generis it still seems inconceivable that Gareth Southgate will find a space for him in his meat-and-potatoes England team; but good enough to come to the home of the champions and provide his own unique notes of illumination.
