If your response to Alexander-Arnold playing well involves the words ‘Reece James’ you’re part of the problem | OneFootball

Trent Alexander-Arnold played really well for Liverpool on Monday night.

Once again adopting the kind of freeform jazz interpretation of right-backing that has worked so well in Liverpool’s post-Real Madrid resurgence, Alexander-Arnold was one of a number of Liverpool players to really catch the eye in a fine performance and result against a freefalling Leicester.

Curtis Jones took two goals beautifully. Mo Salah racked up a hat-trick of assists – the first time he’s managed that unusual feat in the Premier League – and Alexander-Arnold capped off his own fine all-round display with a delicious third goal, the ball sent arcing into the top corner from distance after Salah teed him up from a free-kick.

Lots to enjoy there for Liverpool. Salah a constant menace, despite a comical late missed chance, and two local lads from the Academy keeping their team firmly in the hunt for Champions League places, as they have done time and again over recent weeks, and offering plenty of encouragement for what next season might bring.

You’d be happy with it, wouldn’t you? If you were a Liverpool fan? Seven straight wins and some cracking football? The mid-season doubts about the team’s future and Jurgen Klopp’s future melting away in front of your eyes? Lovely, lovely, lovely stuff.

But for a significant subsection of fans, the first thought about Alexander-Arnold playing really, really well was not “It is nice and good that Alexander-Arnold is playing really, really well” but instead “Take that, haters!” It is this subsection of fans who had ‘Reece James’ trending on Twitter in response to a game absolutely not featuring Reece James.

I know, I know: Twitter is Twitter. But it’s not just found there – it’s just easier to see it and harder to avoid it. This idea of everything in football having to be some chapter in some culture war. It’s exhausting in real life, and we’re letting it take over football too. Look at the endless Arsenal bottling discourse for further proof – the great irony there, of course, being that no other fanbase has so gleefully deployed the word until now. And the other great irony is that even there by pointing that out I’m only further contributing to the sorry mess.

The only hope on that particular score is that if some consensus is reached that what Arsenal have done this season isn’t in fact bottling then we might all be able to grow up a bit and agree that the entire concept is hazy, reductive, simplistic and unhelpful. But also, they did bottle it. A bit. Come on. West Ham? Southampton? Brighton?

It’s a slim chance, but at least it’s there. Arsenal fans have, if nothing else, limited their own future scope for bottle-based banter with their understandably sniffy response to their own taste of it.

The right-back culture war has no such scope, however small, for peaceful resolution. A good performance by your chosen fighter must be viewed through the prism of owning some rival or other. It can never just be a nice thing.

Obviously, rivalry has been a part of football for as long as posts and boots and goals, but there’s a specifically tribal and toxic and personal side to it all now. There is something delicious about watching your rivals struggle and squirm, but once you let that consume you it’s a lot less healthy. Once you enjoy that more than any success your own team enjoys then it feels like a dark path to be treading.

Monday night is one small example, but it seems so bizarre to celebrate that TAA performance not for what it was but for what it might mean to a completely different player at a completely different club.

And even if you accept this way of following the game, does anything Alexander-Arnold does in this current run of form while conspicuously abandoning all pretext of behaving anything like an orthodox right-back actually mean anything anyway? We don’t really think Alexander-Arnold has ‘haters’; what he’s done in recent weeks, if anything, is lots of the things literally every football fan on earth thought he was really good at already and far less of the things the sceptics/haters/bias one-eyed United scum were a bit sceptical about.

But even that’s not really the point. We blame Messi v Ronaldo. That was the one that melted the brains of many football fans, all of whom are apparently obliged to pick their side and stick to it forevermore, come what may, cherrypicking stats or elevating certain accomplishments while denigrating others to paint their man in the best possible light and more importantly downplay the absurd all-time career of the other until the seas boil or the cockroaches take over.

That often toxic GOAT debate has filtered down through the levels, fuelled by clickbait, propelled by radio gobshites and swallowed whole by (some) fans.

It just doesn’t seem a very fun way to enjoy football. Especially as Reece James is so obviously better than Trent Alexander-Arnold. Only a fool would argue otherwise, and I’ve got the carefully curated stats to prove it, you idiots.