Alexander-Arnold: I’m not going to be satisfied until I’m Liverpool captain
The 18-year-old has played only 12 times for the first team, but the right back says that he is ready to live up to the hype
Paul Joyce, Northern Football Correspondent
May 6 2017, 12:01am, The Times
Alexander-Arnold trained with the senior squad at the Bernabeu in 2014 aged 16 and has played 12 times this seasonANDREW POWELL/LIVERPOOL/GETTY IMAGES
Trent Alexander-Arnold was the child who would peek through the cracks in the wall at Melwood to catch a glimpse of his heroes training, before becoming the teenager left thrilled when spotting his name on the back of a supporter’s replica shirt.
Yet while that journey has taken him into the first-team squad at Liverpool, it has only scratched the surface of his ambition.
“I have achieved goals, but the dream is to captain Liverpool,” he said. “There will be goals to achieve along the way, but until I captain Liverpool I will not be satisfied.
“It goes back to Steven Gerrard. He was my idol. To see him week in, week out wearing that armband — I always wanted to be like him so wearing that armband would mean a lot to me.”
That is bold talk from an 18-year-old with 12 senior appearances under his belt, but there is no trace of cockiness in Alexander-Arnold’s words.
Desire, enthusiasm, humility, self-assurance, loyalty — all of those qualities shine through as Liverpool’s rising star fields questions, the answers to which belie his tender years.
Crucially, everyone at Anfield, from manager Jürgen Klopp down, believes Alexander-Arnold possesses the attributes to turn that fantasy into reality.
The secret has long since been out on the right back, who is equally comfortable in midfield, and who boasts pace, can pass and tackle and has an edge, just the right side of nasty, that some of his team-mates also see in Dele Alli, the Tottenham Hotspur and England midfielder.
It was written on page 353 of Gerrard’s autobiography, My Story, when the author, who had coached Alexander-Arnold while gaining his Uefa B licence, tipped him for the top. He remains a mentor to his protégé.
Still, the long-held notion that he was a sure thing jars with how he first came to Liverpool’s attention as a six-year-old pupil from St Matthews Primary School in the Clubmoor area of the city. If good fortune was on the youngster’s side, then it would soon belong to Liverpool.
“It was a tournament, a summer camp,” said Alexander-Arnold, remembering that initial visit to the academy in Kirkby. “A lot of lads from different schools got invited up there. There was only a certain amount of specific invites for my age group. Not everyone in my class could go but, luckily enough, I got drawn out of the hat. Straight after that summer camp, they approached my mum [Diane] and asked if I could start going up on a regular basis and start training and playing games.
“There were no contracts involved at that age. I always knew that I wanted to play for Liverpool, it was never a case of wanting to go to another club.”
He did, briefly, cross the Mersey divide and train with Everton soon after, but smiles when asked if he saw the light.
“I did a couple of sessions,” he said. “There was a time when I was young when I wasn’t really enjoying Liverpool. I wanted to see if it was different at other clubs. With Liverpool it was more training than games, so I just wanted to play as much as I could.
“I tried Everton but they were the same so I thought, ‘I’d rather be doing this at Liverpool.’ ”
Ian Barrigan, the Liverpool youth coach, was among those who were influential in coaxing Alexander-Arnold back to the fold. Having signed a five-year deal with Liverpool in November, the hope is that he never leaves again.
Turn left at the Jolly Miller pub on Queens Drive, not far from where the England Under-19 player lives with his family, walk down Mill Lane and Barnfield Drive and you arrive on Melwood Drive.
Alexander-Arnold trod that path numerous times to join the throng outside the gates of Liverpool’s training complex hoping to see the star he now seeks to emulate.
“I had a lot of idols growing up,” he said. “Like [Fernando] Torres, Gerrard, [Jamie] Carragher, [Xabi] Alonso, all of them. I really looked up to them. Obviously just living around the corner, it was an opportunity to see them. I’d never really seen them close up. I just used to try and look in the cars as they went past. I used to squint through the cracks in the wall and watch them train.”
Now the roles are reversed. It was while he was walking through Liverpool city centre in February that it dawned on him how far he has come.
Alexander-Arnold is one of a number of young players to have earnt Klopp’s trust this seasonDAN MULLAN/GETTY IMAGES
“There was one thing,” says Alexander-Arnold. “I saw a lad wearing my shirt. That was when it kicked in fully. It was in town. I just remember seeing it and I was taken aback.
“I never thought I could mean that much to someone. I’m just a lad playing for Liverpool trying to achieve his dream so to see a lad with my name on his shirt, when I grew up having names of other players on my shirt, it meant a lot. Now when I go out I am getting recognised and you feel that people know who you are when you walk into a restaurant or something. But I don’t think it has changed me. I haven’t gone big-headed or anything like that.
“The people around me have kept my feet on the floor. They have told me that I have got a long way to go before I make it.”
That level-headed outlook has also been drummed into him by Alex Inglethorpe, Liverpool’s academy director. Alexander-Arnold tells a story from last summer when, despite his burgeoning reputation, training with the first team was not a given.
“At the start of pre-season, I got told I was coming up to Melwood,” he says. “On a daily basis, Pep [Lijnders, first-team development coach] would come down to the reserve changing room and say to me, Ben [Woodburn] and Ovie [Ejaria] that we had to come back the next day. That helped us. Every day, we thought it could be our last so we fought harder and harder.
“It just carried on into the season where I still didn’t know whether I was fully up here. I just came up until September and that’s when me and Ovie got moved into the first-team changing room. That’s when we fully realised it was happening. We got our own lockers and we felt part of the first team.”
He has not looked back. There was a debut devoid of nerves against Tottenham Hotspur in the EFL Cup and a late call-up to start a Premier League game at Old Trafford in January, an occasion that carried extra significance given that his uncle, John Alexander, is Manchester United’s secretary.
“He has a lot of knowledge about the game so will text me from time to time to say well done,” Alexander-Arnold says. “It is never to do with our clubs. He is just happy for me.”
Yet there have also been bumps along the way to serve as a reminder of the hurdles that will continue to rear. He was substituted, along with Woodburn, at half-time of last month’s game away to Stoke City with Liverpool launching a comeback to win 2-1 in their absence.
Likewise, he was fortunate not to be sent off after a clash with Jamie Spencer, of Huddersfield Town, in an under-23 match in February.
“Obviously, I went away a little bit disappointed [from Stoke] because I knew I could have done better in that first half and maybe if I had I might have stayed on, but I was still happy with the win,” he says. “We had a day off the following day and Ben and myself got a text off Hendo [Jordan Henderson] and he just said it happens, he knows that we’re good enough and that the next time we got a chance to make sure we take it.
“It lifted us to have the captain saying that and letting us know that he believes in us. It gave us that little bit of faith in ourselves and he also told us to make sure we were at it straight away in training and we were.”
Of that spat with Spencer, where the pair traded punches and kicks, he said: “I spoke to Alex [Inglethorpe] about it. I was lucky it was an under-23 game so I could learn from it and make sure it does not happen again. If I’d been sent off, it would have been a three-game ban and an unnecessary loss for the team.
“Alex has overseen most training sessions and games and been there to tell me what I have done well and done wrong. Some of the time it has not always been the feedback you want, but it is always to help. I respect his word.”
There is the added responsibility on him of arguably being the first homegrown academy graduate since Gerrard who looks like making the breakthrough and staying in the team.
“There has not really been a player coming through at Liverpool in a while, but I don’t see it as pressure,” he added.
“There is a pathway and as long as I stay on the straight and narrow — don’t get led astray — I have a chance.”
The 18-year-old has played only 12 times for the first team, but the right back says that he is ready to live up to the hype
Paul Joyce, Northern Football Correspondent
May 6 2017, 12:01am, The Times
Alexander-Arnold trained with the senior squad at the Bernabeu in 2014 aged 16 and has played 12 times this seasonANDREW POWELL/LIVERPOOL/GETTY IMAGES
Trent Alexander-Arnold was the child who would peek through the cracks in the wall at Melwood to catch a glimpse of his heroes training, before becoming the teenager left thrilled when spotting his name on the back of a supporter’s replica shirt.
Yet while that journey has taken him into the first-team squad at Liverpool, it has only scratched the surface of his ambition.
“I have achieved goals, but the dream is to captain Liverpool,” he said. “There will be goals to achieve along the way, but until I captain Liverpool I will not be satisfied.
“It goes back to Steven Gerrard. He was my idol. To see him week in, week out wearing that armband — I always wanted to be like him so wearing that armband would mean a lot to me.”
That is bold talk from an 18-year-old with 12 senior appearances under his belt, but there is no trace of cockiness in Alexander-Arnold’s words.
Desire, enthusiasm, humility, self-assurance, loyalty — all of those qualities shine through as Liverpool’s rising star fields questions, the answers to which belie his tender years.
Crucially, everyone at Anfield, from manager Jürgen Klopp down, believes Alexander-Arnold possesses the attributes to turn that fantasy into reality.
The secret has long since been out on the right back, who is equally comfortable in midfield, and who boasts pace, can pass and tackle and has an edge, just the right side of nasty, that some of his team-mates also see in Dele Alli, the Tottenham Hotspur and England midfielder.
It was written on page 353 of Gerrard’s autobiography, My Story, when the author, who had coached Alexander-Arnold while gaining his Uefa B licence, tipped him for the top. He remains a mentor to his protégé.
Still, the long-held notion that he was a sure thing jars with how he first came to Liverpool’s attention as a six-year-old pupil from St Matthews Primary School in the Clubmoor area of the city. If good fortune was on the youngster’s side, then it would soon belong to Liverpool.
“It was a tournament, a summer camp,” said Alexander-Arnold, remembering that initial visit to the academy in Kirkby. “A lot of lads from different schools got invited up there. There was only a certain amount of specific invites for my age group. Not everyone in my class could go but, luckily enough, I got drawn out of the hat. Straight after that summer camp, they approached my mum [Diane] and asked if I could start going up on a regular basis and start training and playing games.
“There were no contracts involved at that age. I always knew that I wanted to play for Liverpool, it was never a case of wanting to go to another club.”
He did, briefly, cross the Mersey divide and train with Everton soon after, but smiles when asked if he saw the light.
“I did a couple of sessions,” he said. “There was a time when I was young when I wasn’t really enjoying Liverpool. I wanted to see if it was different at other clubs. With Liverpool it was more training than games, so I just wanted to play as much as I could.
“I tried Everton but they were the same so I thought, ‘I’d rather be doing this at Liverpool.’ ”
Ian Barrigan, the Liverpool youth coach, was among those who were influential in coaxing Alexander-Arnold back to the fold. Having signed a five-year deal with Liverpool in November, the hope is that he never leaves again.
Turn left at the Jolly Miller pub on Queens Drive, not far from where the England Under-19 player lives with his family, walk down Mill Lane and Barnfield Drive and you arrive on Melwood Drive.
Alexander-Arnold trod that path numerous times to join the throng outside the gates of Liverpool’s training complex hoping to see the star he now seeks to emulate.
“I had a lot of idols growing up,” he said. “Like [Fernando] Torres, Gerrard, [Jamie] Carragher, [Xabi] Alonso, all of them. I really looked up to them. Obviously just living around the corner, it was an opportunity to see them. I’d never really seen them close up. I just used to try and look in the cars as they went past. I used to squint through the cracks in the wall and watch them train.”
Now the roles are reversed. It was while he was walking through Liverpool city centre in February that it dawned on him how far he has come.
Alexander-Arnold is one of a number of young players to have earnt Klopp’s trust this seasonDAN MULLAN/GETTY IMAGES
“There was one thing,” says Alexander-Arnold. “I saw a lad wearing my shirt. That was when it kicked in fully. It was in town. I just remember seeing it and I was taken aback.
“I never thought I could mean that much to someone. I’m just a lad playing for Liverpool trying to achieve his dream so to see a lad with my name on his shirt, when I grew up having names of other players on my shirt, it meant a lot. Now when I go out I am getting recognised and you feel that people know who you are when you walk into a restaurant or something. But I don’t think it has changed me. I haven’t gone big-headed or anything like that.
“The people around me have kept my feet on the floor. They have told me that I have got a long way to go before I make it.”
That level-headed outlook has also been drummed into him by Alex Inglethorpe, Liverpool’s academy director. Alexander-Arnold tells a story from last summer when, despite his burgeoning reputation, training with the first team was not a given.
“At the start of pre-season, I got told I was coming up to Melwood,” he says. “On a daily basis, Pep [Lijnders, first-team development coach] would come down to the reserve changing room and say to me, Ben [Woodburn] and Ovie [Ejaria] that we had to come back the next day. That helped us. Every day, we thought it could be our last so we fought harder and harder.
“It just carried on into the season where I still didn’t know whether I was fully up here. I just came up until September and that’s when me and Ovie got moved into the first-team changing room. That’s when we fully realised it was happening. We got our own lockers and we felt part of the first team.”
He has not looked back. There was a debut devoid of nerves against Tottenham Hotspur in the EFL Cup and a late call-up to start a Premier League game at Old Trafford in January, an occasion that carried extra significance given that his uncle, John Alexander, is Manchester United’s secretary.
“He has a lot of knowledge about the game so will text me from time to time to say well done,” Alexander-Arnold says. “It is never to do with our clubs. He is just happy for me.”
Yet there have also been bumps along the way to serve as a reminder of the hurdles that will continue to rear. He was substituted, along with Woodburn, at half-time of last month’s game away to Stoke City with Liverpool launching a comeback to win 2-1 in their absence.
Likewise, he was fortunate not to be sent off after a clash with Jamie Spencer, of Huddersfield Town, in an under-23 match in February.
“Obviously, I went away a little bit disappointed [from Stoke] because I knew I could have done better in that first half and maybe if I had I might have stayed on, but I was still happy with the win,” he says. “We had a day off the following day and Ben and myself got a text off Hendo [Jordan Henderson] and he just said it happens, he knows that we’re good enough and that the next time we got a chance to make sure we take it.
“It lifted us to have the captain saying that and letting us know that he believes in us. It gave us that little bit of faith in ourselves and he also told us to make sure we were at it straight away in training and we were.”
Of that spat with Spencer, where the pair traded punches and kicks, he said: “I spoke to Alex [Inglethorpe] about it. I was lucky it was an under-23 game so I could learn from it and make sure it does not happen again. If I’d been sent off, it would have been a three-game ban and an unnecessary loss for the team.
“Alex has overseen most training sessions and games and been there to tell me what I have done well and done wrong. Some of the time it has not always been the feedback you want, but it is always to help. I respect his word.”
There is the added responsibility on him of arguably being the first homegrown academy graduate since Gerrard who looks like making the breakthrough and staying in the team.
“There has not really been a player coming through at Liverpool in a while, but I don’t see it as pressure,” he added.
“There is a pathway and as long as I stay on the straight and narrow — don’t get led astray — I have a chance.”
