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It’s been a strange season for Trent Alexander-Arnold.
Liverpool’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad centre back injuries have required the full backs to tighten up a bit and stop flying forward so quickly. This has both stopped him doing what he’s really good at, and forced him to do more of the things he’s not so great at. It’s not ideal.
It feels emblematic of the side, which he’s been pretty open about admitting has not been doing well.
“Once you get accustomed to winning all the time, which we have been doing in the previous two seasons really, you do get used to the feeling and you start to kind of expect it”, the Liverpool Echo report Alexander-Arnold as saying.
“That’s probably the trap that we fell into this season in that we expected to win games because we’re good enough, something will happen and we have that quality to find a goal from somewhere, which happened naturally last season and the season before.
“But really breaking it down, that didn’t just happen because we were lucky, it happened because we worked hard, doing the basics and fundamentals right until the very last minute.
“That really worked in our favour. The fact we were still doing it meant we were creating the right opportunities that we could score from.
“I think maybe this season, we’ve forgotten a few of those fundamentals and we’ve just expected us to do that because it became so natural for us to do it.
“Every team goes through periods like this. You can’t expect anyone to keep winning every single game, especially in a league like the Premier League. It would be wrong of us to expect that from ourselves and for people to expect it of us. We want to, but I think in the back of our minds, we all knew this period would come at some point.”
Look, he’s not wrong. But the hard bit is finding the rhythm again to win games. Let’s hope it’s about to click into gear.