The Red Bulletin May 2020 (UK)

Trent Alexander-Arnold
number, with nine league games still to play. Since breaking
into the Liverpool first team in 2016, Trent has redefined
the role of playmaker – the creative player who controls
attacking play and provides goalscoring opportunities for
others. Conventionally, this is the domain of a central
midfielder or winger, but Trent is performing the role from
the traditionally unfashionable full-back position. While
not the first-ever attacking right-sided defender – the likes
of Cafu and Dani Alves (both Brazilians, both heroes of
Trent’s) have dazzled in the role over the past 30 years –
the young Liverpool player is arguably the greatest
exponent in the world today. Cafu himself named Trent
a possible future winner of the Ballon d’Or, the annual
award presented to the world’s best player. “I can’t thank
him enough,” Trent says, humbly. “Legends don’t need to
say those kinds of things.”
Cool-headedness, precision and speed of thought have
become Trent’s trademarks. Few eyebrows were raised,
then, when in October 2018 the footballer was brought faceto-face
with Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen in a
PR-arranged display game of chess. The self-professed chess
fan – taught the game as a child by his father – lasted just
17 moves against the pro, but at least he bettered Microsoft
co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates (beaten after only
nine). Is such strategic thinking an advantage in his own
field of expertise, transferable from the board to the pitch?
“You could link football to chess in terms of trying to
think one, two or three moves ahead of the opposition and
anticipate what they’ll do,” he says. “You have to think
ahead and know what you’re kind of going to do before you
receive the ball. Before I get it, I try to get a picture of what
it’ll look like as I’m receiving it and as I’m going to pass it.
I’ll look to see where the attackers are. If the attackers aren’t
in positions to go in behind, then I’ll know I can’t do that
before I even get the ball. If I look and see that they are,
that’s an option for me. But you have to understand that
football changes in the flick of a second, and that by the
time you put your head down and bring it back up,
everything’s changed. Once you’re in the heat of the game,
all these things come naturally, and you’re not thinking step
by step. It’s just all ‘boom’, happening in the moment.”
“You have to
understand that
football changes
in the flick
of a second”
Rapper J Hus’ new album plays in the background as
Trent leans on a weathered guardrail and stares out at
a waterlogged pitch, an angry wind rattling the tin roof
of the exposed stand to his right. Football has been
Trent’s life since the age of six, when he first signed up with
Liverpool FC’s Academy, and it was a lower-league club like
this grassroots concern on the outskirts of the city that helped
him hone his craft. Playing at the Academy sharpened his skills
and weeded out any bad habits – “I used to show too much
frustration, anger and disappointment; I had to learn to make
things right on the pitch rather than beating myself up and
letting my head go down” – but it couldn’t sate his hunger.
“At that age, you’re only playing two or three times a week,”
he says. “I wanted to play more than that, so one of the
[Academy] scouts told my mum, ‘I’ve got this team – if you
want to bring him on a Sunday morning, you can.’”
In time, Trent and his brothers Tyler (now 25) and Marcel
(17) were all turning out for the team, the now-defunct
Country Park FC in Croxteth. But when it became clear that
Trent’s talents needed space to grow and that his fledgling
career was placing pressure on family commitments, his single
mum, Dianne, saw that something had to give. “They sacrificed
a lot for me to be able to play football when I had to,” Trent
admits. “It must have been difficult for an older brother who
was missing out on football because of his younger brother.
And likewise a younger brother who isn’t really allowed to
enjoy the same freedom in football as us, because he has to
miss certain games to come and watch me play.”
The close and supportive relationship Trent enjoyed with his
brothers also fomented a fiercely competitive streak seemingly
at odds with his humble, somewhat introverted persona. His
competitiveness on a scale of one to 10? “Er, nine? If not 10,”
he concedes. “Yeah, I’d probably say 10.” This edge remains an
integral part of what he does, right down to his training: “If you
can make something competitive, you put more into it. If you
were to ask me to pass the ball for ages against a wall or do as
many keepy-ups as I can, I’d get bored. But if someone’s next to
me and you said, ‘See who drops it first,’ I’d go for a lot longer.”
At the age of 14, at the behest of the Academy, Trent
transferred schools from the fee-paying St Mary’s College in
Crosby to Rainhill High School, an institution with links to
Liverpool FC that allows young players to balance academic
studies with their sports training. He passed seven GCSEs, two
of which he had to sit remotely in between training and playing
for the England under-16s team in Belgium. “It was intense
juggling both,” he admits. “But for me and my family, education
36 THE RED BULLETIN