The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - The Telegraph Magazine
Local hero
Paul Davies meets the Liverpool defender who’s helping to change the image of football
‘YOU’VE GOT TO BELIEVE IN THE CAUSE AND THAT IT’S GOING TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE’
One of England’s best young sportsmen and part of a new breed of socially conscious players, Liverpool’s Trent Alexander-arnold is helping us see football from a new angle. He tells Paul Davies how sibling rivalry, chess and community spirit have helped shape him
April 2, 2020. Britain is a few weeks into its first national lockdown and Premier League football has been put on ice. Liverpool, the reigning champions of Europe, the world club champions and the league’s runaway leaders, having won 27 of their first 29 games of the season, will have to wait a little longer before strolling to their first domestic title in 30 years.
Meanwhile, at a daily press briefing on the coronavirus crisis, and with the public mood turning sour, Matt Hancock is seeking a diversion from the disaster at hand. Asked whether, as footballers aren’t even playing, they should be taking a pay cut to help the NHS, the Health Secretary replies: ‘Given the sacrifices that many people are making, I think everybody needs to play their part in this national effort – and that means Premier League footballers, too.’
In politics, as in football, 10 months is a long time. In both spheres, participants are regularly slated for being out of touch and living in their own elite bubble. High-profile examples of lockdown rule-flouters, from Tottenham midfielders to the Prime Minister’s chief adviser, rub the public up the wrong way. Where the two professions arguably differ is that a number of those who kick a ball for a living have emerged from 2020 with their reputations enhanced.
One player who has seen his status grow over the past year is defender Trent Alexander-arnold. A regular in the Liverpool team for the past three seasons, he has ticked off some of football’s biggest team prizes by the age of 22, and been busy amassing individual accolades too. In December he was included in the Fifa/fifpro World XI – the first Englishman to make the list of the planet’s top 11 players since Wayne Rooney in 2011.
Also in December, he became the first Scouser to captain Liverpool since Steven Gerrard, his childhood idol, and he appears to have inherited Gerrard’s mantle as the club’s home-grown figurehead. Spraypainted evidence can be found on the corner of Sybil Road, 100 metres from Liverpool’s Anfield stadium, in the form of a three-storey mural of Alexander-arnold. Alongside the portrait, painted in August 2019 by French street artist Akse, are the words ‘I’m just a normal lad from Liverpool whose dream has come true.’
He takes his responsibilities as a role model seriously. ‘As a footballer you’re under a lot of scrutiny at all times,’ he tells me over Zoom. ‘So being someone that kids can look up to is now a 24/7 role. You just have to try to be as perfect as you can be.’ To borrow Matt Hancock’s phrase, you have to play your part – on and off the pitch.
The Anfield mural also bears the words ‘For fans supporting food banks’ – an issue close to Alexander-arnold’s heart. ‘It’s big for me,’ he says, ‘especially at a time like this, in winter, with so many people struggling after a horrendous year.’ He has been an ambassador for An Hour for Others, a Liverpool charity that encourages communities to work together to tackle poverty, mental health problems, loneliness and crime. In 2018 he spent Christmas Day helping deliver presents to struggling families and the elderly. These aren’t token gestures. ‘It’s not because it’s going to give you a good reputation. You’ve got to believe in the cause and that it’s going to make a difference.’
What has he made of the campaigning work of 23-year-old Manchester United striker Marcus Rashford, who has been a thorn in the Government’s side with his high-profile efforts to tackle child food poverty? ‘He’s an inspiration to so many. I’ve got huge respect for him. And he’ll keep up the amazing work because I’m sure in his head he’s not finished yet.’
The two men, representing the North West’s two fiercest rivals, are both just getting started. They are likely to dominate the football scene for the next decade, although the Liverpool player is arguably further ahead in his development. International sports channel ESPN has named Alexanderarnold the world’s best right back for two years running. Alexander-arnold himself has acknowledged that most kids don’t grow up dreaming of playing at right back, although he may be changing that – with his lightning-fast attacking runs and jaw-dropping long-range passes, not to mention a Guinness World Record for the most goal assists by a defender. Last year former Liverpool centre back Jamie Carragher described him as ‘the most creative player in the best team in Europe’. Alexander-arnold, he says, ‘has made playing right back sexy’.
Ten thousand hours. Practise anything for that long, the theory goes, and you’ll be a virtuoso. Alexander-arnold is certain he clocked up that magic number playing football with his brothers as a boy – and possibly many more. He is the middle of three (Tyler is four years older, and is now his agent; Marcel is three years his junior) and it was, he says with understatement, ‘a very football-orientated childhood’.
Outside in the garden of their home in West Derby, one of Liverpool’s more affluent suburbs, or indoors in the hallway, there was always a game going on, he tells me. ‘We’d be kicking rolled-up socks, balls – anything we could get our hands on, we’d be kicking it – and finding ways to turn it into a competition. We’d just keep playing all night and, now that I look back on it, I see that what I was doing was practising. I was putting the hours in that others weren’t.’
The sibling rivalry spurred him on. ‘Growing up, my competitiveness was through the roof,’ he says. ‘I was never fond of just kicking a ball against a wall to improve my passing. I’d always get one of my brothers and we’d have a game, with a forfeit for the loser. We were competitive in everything – even walking down the street we’d make a race out of it.’
The boys’ parents, entrepreneur Michael – who used to trade commodities and now oversees his son’s business affairs – and mother Dianne, saw their opportunity to harness this competitive streak. ‘Mum and Dad would set us all educational questions and quizzes to see who could get the most right. We’d play academic games, chess…’
Chess might not sound like an obvious hobby for a football-mad kid, but ‘Dad had grown up playing it so it was something he
wanted to pass on to us. And if it was raining and Mum was telling us off for playing football indoors, we’d have to find a different way of being competitive. We’d do that through chess.’
Beating his brothers at chess gave him ‘a different sense of superiority’ compared to scoring goals against them. ‘A lot of satisfaction in beating them came from it being a mental game. It’s the strategy. It’s not just because you’ve got a better shot, it’s knowing you’ve got to outsmart your opponent.’
The game has stayed with him, and while ‘I’m not at home every night studying chess’, he still finds time to play, including an exhibition match against the world chess champion Magnus Carlsen, in October 2018. ‘It was something I’ll never forget, even though it was over pretty quickly…’ Carlsen triumphed in 17 moves (eight more than it took him to beat Bill Gates). Alexander-arnold feels ‘the fundamentals of winning are the same’ in both football and chess, but does his chess brain ever help him on the pitch?
‘When you talk about people who are good at football and chess,’ he says, ‘you could say that they see things before others do and that they’re thinking a few steps ahead.’
In his rapid rise, Alexanderarnold has earned a reputation for being one of those rare players who seems to be able to spot moves and angles that his rivals don’t. One of his greatest football moments came in May 2019, during an epic Champions League quarter final against Barcelona. With the tie level at 3-3 towards the end of the second leg, Alexander-arnold won a corner. Spotting teammate Divock Origi unmarked in the penalty area, and with most Barcelona players still getting into position or looking in the other direction, he quickly fired in a low pass. Origi scored; Liverpool won the tie and went on to lift the cup.
Footage of the goal has been watched millions of times on Youtube. ‘Corner Taken Quickly’ became a popular T-shirt slogan among Liverpool fans. The team’s manager Jürgen Klopp described Alexanderarnold’s quick thinking as the smartest – and cheekiest – thing he’d ever seen on a football pitch.
Smart and cheeky sums him up pretty well. He’s softly spoken, funny and thoughtful, with long pauses after questions as he gathers his words. For Alexander-arnold’s mum and dad, education always came first, and the boys were enrolled at St Mary’s College, a Catholic private school up the coast in Crosby. ‘There was a massive emphasis from my parents to do well at school,’ he says. ‘So if my education was slipping or if I was misbehaving, my football would have to suffer. If I had a bad report or there was an incident at school, that evening I’d miss training. I’d have to behave myself to get the reward of football.’
His former PE teacher, Derek Williams, has described him as a quiet boy with ‘an unbelievable focus’. That focus was football, and Liverpool in particular. The family home was two minutes away from Liverpool’s Melwood training ground and occasionally he’d peer through a crack in the wall to watch the players doing their drills, or climb on to a wheelie bin for a better view. He still vividly remembers the sensory overload of watching his first game at Anfield in 2005, a Champions League game against Juventus. ‘It was mind-blowing. The sounds, the smells, everything is enhanced.’ It also, he says, ‘just felt… right’. He knew where he wanted to be.
Aged six, he joined Liverpool Football Club’s youth academy. Even at that level, ‘I’d go above and beyond to win. lot of people were lacking that in the teams I played in.’ In the academy system, ‘I never thought of myself as the best in the team’; what he had, though, was more hunger. ‘I didn’t know any different, it was how I’d been brought up.’
On 25 October 2016, a fortnight after his 18th birthday, he made his professional debut in a 2-1 win over Spurs – the first of over 150 club appearances and counting. It remains his proudest moment. ‘There won’t be anything that comes close to that,’ he says.
His England debut in June 2018 was another high point, and he has already won 12 international caps at senior level. He’s at the heart of an exciting generation of talented English players that includes Rashford and Raheem Sterling, and which sees the England team placed at number four in the current FIFA world rankings. With players generally reaching the peak of their abilities in their late 20s, England’s new golden generation should have their best years ahead of them.
Sterling is another footballer to have emerged as an articulate voice on social issues; he has spoken out against racism, made a substantial donation to survivors of the Grenfell fire and announced plans to set up his own charity foundation in the wake of
‘Being someone that kids can look up to… You have to try to be as perfect as you can be’