The Trent Alexander-Arnold discourse continues apace, with criticism of Liverpool ‘hypocrisy’ and a defence of the Reds trying to make an ‘enemy’ ‘spiral’.
Send your thoughts to theeditor@football365.com.
TAA and midfields
I can’t be bothered to respond to all of Andy H, Swansea’s email but you’re the type of fan that seems to give Liverpool fans a bad name.
Your midfield 3 is the best in Europe? You found one of them down the back of the sofa last season, the long haired one has been filling in at right back for half this season and the Argentine Scotsman was getting pelters for being sh*t and off his game in these very pages no more than a few weeks ago.
They were so good no more than 2 weeks ago that even Chelsea were walking through them……..
As for TAA, this line was glorious “Way to go to torch your own career and chuck your England chances down the sh*tter at the same time”.
Remind yourself who he plays for? He’s at Madrid. Love them or hate them, they’re infinitely bigger and more storied than Liverpool. He’s having teething problems? Of course he is, it’s a new country, new team etc. If he’s not doing it after 18 months then sure, come for him. Do you remember Modric setting the world on fire when he first went there? No, he got voted worst signing of the season. We all know how that turned out.
As for the England element.
TAA has started 14 times for England and has 34 caps in total. Since his debut, England have played 89 times so on average he gets picked to join the squad in every 1 of 3 games and starts roughly 1 in every 6 games.
I think his England career is already fairly torched.
Lee, Hornsey (Chelsea are so frustrating to watch nowadays).
Boo-urns
I am sure you will get a lot of emails going back and forth on this and everyone in each camp will say essentially the same thing. One side will say he shouldn’t be booed because he was a perfect professional and local lad who reasonably decided to leave after winning everything and test himself at the biggest club in the world. The other side will say he left the league champions to play at a direct European rival and he should be booed.
I think a lot has been made out of this when it really isn’t such a big deal. When he still played for Liverpool and got booed, that was a big deal. Liverpool fans booing one of their own shouldn’t happen. I don’t think any club’s fans should boo their own player. I certainly hold our club up to a better standard than that. It didn’t surprise me, because that’s society and every club has knobheads. However, Klopp came out and gave the collective fandom a dressing down for such behaviour, and thankfully at the end of season presentation he was loudly and collectively cheered. It was a great sendoff and the way it should have been.
But coming back with Madrid is markedly different. He is not a Liverpool player anymore, he is the opposition, and he comes to Anfield to hurt Liverpool by scoring or assisting or doing whatever he can to win, as he should. That’s the deal. For those 90 minutes he is the enemy and the fans job is to make his life hard. After the game they can be friendly and nice, but during the game it is perfectly appropriate to boo him and try and put him off.
Let us be clear, I am not advocating hurling horrendous abuse at the lad. I don’t like it aimed at anyone, but good old-fashioned booing is as old as time. If you are a professional player and you can’t hack a bit of booing, then you should consider another career. He is a big boy and paid a fortune. That doesn’t justify abusing a footballer, because no one should be abused, but booing is, literally and legally, not abuse. Booing happens at the panto. Booing is almost tongue in cheek. I don’t even boo, I say boo-urns.
And it is interesting that Trent himself came out before the game and said any reaction he got would not change how he feels about the club. I think this was a little bit of an admission that he was coming as the opposition, and nobody was going to make it easy for him. He has not been starting and was almost immediately back in Liverpool playing a big game. He was a reasonable target. If the crowd got on top of him and he wasn’t playing well, it could go south. We’ve seen it with Trent before. If things were going poorly, he would occasionally spiral. If the opposition have a possible weak spot, you try and expose it.
If I am honest, I think a lot of the hand wringing is one of two things – The media concocting a story where there isn’t one – either a pampered, preening footballer who is paid a fortune and gets upset when he gets a bit of grief or society is crumbling and the malignant masses are hurling abuse at a footballer for simply choosing his own future. Both narratives have an audience hoping for confirmation to an existing bias. Mana from heaven for click hungry content creators.
The other is football fans loving an opportunity to put the boot in on a rival. It happens a lot. And Liverpool fans are no different to anyone else’s. We will dive on some story or incident that casts shade on a rival club or fanbase. AFTV and the horrific nonsense they shovelled was used as a stick to beat Arsenal fans with under the obviously bullsh*t premise that this accurately conveyed the majority of their supporter base. Nobody really believed it, but it was pleasant to mock and humiliate a rival team pretending it was the case. Man Utd have long been available as a constant stream of comedy content based on the belief that their fans were a bunch of glory-hunting plastic fans who deserved a prolonged period of failure after such dominance for decades. We love to stick the boot in and, as in this case with TAA, will claim some sort of righteous narrative to try and justify the process. Really, it’s just a non-story offering an opportunity to criticise and scorn a team you don’t like.
I think we should all move on…
Ed Ern
Life for Trent
Here’s the thing, Liverpool fans, it’s the hypocrisy that’s so galling. Your self mythologising, “best fans in the world” schtick is shown to be nonsense. You literally sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone”, but people are frequently taking solo strolls, like Trent, like Karius…
As for “This Means More”, yes, it’s a marketing slogan. But it’s a marketing slogan where the entire target market is YOU! That makes it worse. No doubt highly paid marketing executives know exactly how much you love the smell of your own farts and are selling it back to you.
As I heard someone once quip (a West Ham fan, so not a rival) “ah Liverpool, football’s most self righteous club”.
Lewis, Busby Way
A number of emails defending the booing of Trent Alexander-Arnold on the basis that he played cat and mouse with the management over signing a new contract, and the potential distractive impact that may have had on the team last season.
I’ll be sure keep my ears peeled more thoroughly for the boos for Virgil van Dyjk and Mo Salah, as I appeared to have missed those.
Uncle Albert
…and yes, I’m well aware I’ve created a new adjective. I’m mighty proud of it too.
Uncle Albert
READ MORE: Paul Scholes tells TAA he left Liverpool for a ‘worse team’ as he’s told why he was booed
This means bore
Got to love the mailbox for putting a Liverpool emailer talking himself into the conclusion that ‘this actually does mean more’ followed directly by another saying ‘no Liverpool fan I know ever mentions it’.
And Seamus believe it or not there a people in London who don’t like the monarchy or tories either. You’re not that special.
I don’t care if you boo an ex player. But I do think you’re a bit of a dickhead if you do.
Nice one
James
Yesterday morning’s mailbox
A, LFC, Montreal (local lad, clearly): “No Liverpool fan says This Means More”.
Seamus: “Yeah, This Means More”
Minty, LFC: “being a scouser winning the league for the first time in 30 years does just hit a bit different frankly” i.e. This Means More.
Glad that’s all cleared up.
James (This email doesn’t mean anything)
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve always thought deathly silence as a reaction to a returning player would be far more impactful then booing. Just never been able to get Villa Park on board when Jack returns. I’d wager the first time it happens the players would probably stop.
[Insert ‘Not at The Emirates, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference’ joke here].
Gary AVFC, Oxford (No, I wouldn’t boo Jack).
An answer for Mike, LFC, Dubai
Thierry f**king Henry
Nick
MORE ON TRENT ALEXANDER-BOONOLD FROM F365
👉 Liverpool fans accused of ‘acting like tossers’ with ‘pathetic’ Trent boos
👉 Alexander-Arnold gets ‘two-word message’ and ‘brutal mockery’ on ‘shocking’ Anfield return
👉 Liverpool fans labelled ‘disgusting’ and ‘lame’ for Trent Alexander-Arnold reception on Anfield return
English clubs set to dominate Europe
Good morning F365,
As I find myself on a weeks circuit breaker from a very stressful job, recovering from burnout (but that’s another story) I have had far more time than usual to browse footballing websites and distract myself while I for once, take my sweet time with my morning hot chocolate.
An article which particularly caught my eye was one that predicted that Premier League clubs are equipped to dominate European football competition for the next 5 years.
Evidence points to the vast financial disparity in favour of the English clubs compared to the majority of the other teams in the competitions as well as PL clubs also appearing to have now struck that balance between the competitive Premier League and UEFA comps. The Champions League table this morning points to all English teams in the qualifying spots at the half way stage, 4 of them in the automatic spots for the round of 16.
Their rivals? Further glances of the table give you an admittedly outstanding Bayern Munich side, the defending champions in Paris SG, a Barcelona team with what appeared last night ti be a suicidal high line and a Real Madrid who whilst top of their domestic league have in recent seasons encountered difficulty and ultimately defeat with both Arsenal and Liverpool. So 4 teams who could realistically win the competition and not many would bat an eyelid. Of course, the league stage is different to the high stakes nature of the knockout phase, but right now, who would you be putting your money on out of say, Liverpool vs PSG or Arsenal vs Bayern? (Potential final dress rehearsal there in a few weeks?)
While the traditional European giants obviously have their game changer superstars and champion muscle memory, the Premier League clubs now have the far superior resource and strength in depth that can carry them almost effortlessly through the league phase and put them as strong favourites once the serious business rolls around in the spring. And in recent years we are starting to see Engkish sides overcome these traditional Giants of the European game with more regularity.
We are in all likelihood looking at least 5 Premier League teams in the top 8 of the league phase and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see all 6 make it eventually. At that stage you start counting on your fingers and realise that 2 of Bayern, Paris, Barcelona and Real Madrid are going to have to slog through a playoff round where other teams can give them real problems (Brugge vs Barca was a very entertaining game).
I have noted in recent years that Brazilian teams have had a relative stranglehold on the Copa Libertadores (with multiple different winners) as I see that there is also a relative financial gap between Brazllian teams and the other South American leagues. Could we be looking back in ten years time and see that the Champions League has been dominated by English teams in a similar fashion? Aston Villa for example, not in this seasons edition of the CL, but were incredibly close to knocking out the eventual winners in the quarter finals last season.
There’s a part of me that is actually very smug about this, that is, the 10 year old kid who when first watching European football when it was only on terrestrial television was in complete awe of the likes of the great AC Milan, Juventus and to a lesser extent, Inter, who always seemed to win the UEFA cup. The Italian teams who would almost effortlessly swat aside the English teams they faced with almost a sense of disdain and mild contempt, our plucky young Barclays players who ran about a lot but didn’t have the know how, technique or temperament to overcome their far illustrious continental opponents who were well versed in winning. For a few years in a row I watched the best England had to offer at the time, Ferguson’s Man Utd, huff and puff but ultimately succumb to Juventus, Dortmund etc before they did win in 1999 but before that wondering how an English team was ever going to triumph in the Champions League.
Now, in 2025, are we getting towards the point where it’s a case of, which English team will win the Champions League each season?
Enjoy your day all!
C
Chelsea dagger
Can I imagine a Chelsea team in the last 25 years drawing with Qarabag?
I don’t need to. Chelsea have done worse.
I give you the mighty Viking FC knocking Chelsea out of the UEFA cup in 2002.
Football fans lack perspective and there a lot of Chelsea fans who forget that despite winning a lot in the last 25 years we have been fairly shit sometimes as well.
Part of the beauty in football is that no matter how much you spend or how much better the team is on paper. Football is barely organised chaos and occasionally the big boys are humbled.
Simon (Woking)