Trent Alexander-Arnold hasn’t provided many assists this season but the Liverpool right-back is still as important as ever. Jürgen Klopp knows his value.
The problem with narratives is that they can be very difficult to shift. Why focus on a wider body of work when a single moment gives you all the confirmation bias you need, eh?
Trent Alexander-Arnold can’t seem to catch a break this season. He had an excellent game defensively in the recent Merseyside derby, undoubtedly winning his long-running battle with Dwight McNeil. Yet ask people how he performed and many will point to his failure to cut out an Alex Iwobi cross to the back post, which allowed Tom Davies to have Everton’s sole clear-cut chance of the game.
The Liverpool right-back was also unfortunate in an attacking sense. To all intents and purposes he created the first goal Cody Gakpo scored for the Reds, yet thanks to a deflection off a defender, Alexander-Arnold was robbed of an official assist. Jürgen Klopp’s side was once beaten 7-2 by Aston Villa in part thanks to three deflected goals, yet when setting one up, such variations count against a player.
The 24-year-old suffered a similar fate when teeing up Gini Wijnaldum for a strike against Barcelona, and although the derby moment was nowhere near as important, Liverpool’s number 66 only has one league assist this season and could do with adding more to his ledger.
However, while the narrative regarding his defending will likely follow him around throughout his career, a quiet year for creating goals won’t — or at least shouldn’t — dampen views on Alexander-Arnold’s attacking abilities. He is Klopp’s leading player for setting up clear-cut chances this season, with 14 (at least four more than anyone else), while his Scottish colleague on the opposite flank has created half as many but has twice the assists from them.
Per FBref, Alexander-Arnold has the widest margin between expected and actual assists in the Premier League this season, the joint-fourth largest negative discrepancy in Europe’s big five leagues. Finishing is fickle, and Liverpool’s playmaker in chief is feeling the brunt of that from his colleagues in 2022/23. His only hope is that his missing 3.4 assists are repaid in the remainder of the campaign, and that would obviously aid the Reds’ top-four challenge too.
Recently-shared data from Statsbomb highlights that Alexander-Arnold remains one of the top playmakers in the Premier League, regardless of assists. If nothing else, he is comfortably the leading Liverpool player for On-Ball Value (OBV).
If you’re unfamiliar with OBV, think of it like an expected goals model which takes account of every action on the field of play. It assigns a value to every pass, dribble, tackle and other metric you care to mention, in terms of how completing the action will increase or decrease a team’s likelihood of scoring. While precise figures are not available from the above chart, Alexander-Arnold appears to add somewhere in the region of 0.52 per 90 minutes, about 0.2 more than everyone bar Roberto Firmino.
His high rating is not a surprise. The England international is frequently among the Premier League’s leading players for passes into the final third as well as passes and crosses into the opposition penalty area. Equally, for much of this season it has felt like Alexander-Arnold has not attacked as well, with the right hand side of Klopp’s team not functioning as seamlessly as it once did.
The OBV data tells a different tale, with very few players in the division hitting his mark. Again, it’s hard to be certain of accurate numbers, but nobody at Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United or Tottenham has breached the 0.45 mark, when Alexander-Arnold clearly has.
His only realistic contemporaries appear to be Kevin De Bruyne (unsurprisingly) and Kieran Trippier (less obviously). The influence of the latter and the Liverpool man will be keenly felt at St. James’ Park on Saturday. Whichever of them contributes the most when the Reds face Newcastle, Alexander-Arnold remains one of the most valuable on-ball playmakers England has to offer.
SOURCE: liverpool.com
