Stat of the Match: Liverpool 2-1 Brighton
Stat of the Match: Liverpool 2-1 Brighton
Trent Alexander-Arnold made nine tackles against Brighton. It's a lot for a player with a poor reputation for defending but what does it actually tell us?
Liverpool continued their fine start to Arne Slot’s debut campaign with a 2-1 win over Brighton on Saturday. It says a lot for the standard against which the Dutchman will be assessed that he is the first Reds’ boss to win eight of his opening 10 top flight games while also ‘only’ making the club’s fourth best start to a Premier League season.
Despite dropping just five points, Liverpool have also only matched the tally they took from the corresponding fixtures in 2023/24. The clash with the Seagulls was the most similar between the two seasons so far, as it also ended 2-1 at Anfield in March. Brighton led in that game before Mohamed Salah scored the winner too.
This time around, the match was a prime example of the game of two halves cliché. Having lost the shot on target count 4-1 in the first half, Liverpool roared back to dominate 7-1 after the break. One metric which remained constant either side of the interval was the number of dribbles attempt by the visitors’ Kaoru Mitoma, at four apiece.
It is relatively rare for a player to log eight-or-more take-ons against the Reds in a league game. The Brighton winger recorded the 47th instance from the last 276 matches, the first in the Slot era. The only surprise is that Mitoma hasn’t done this to Liverpool in the past.
The Japanese international famously wrote a dissertation on dribbling, though he has since distanced himself from it having any relevance to his career. "I can say that the thesis has almost nothing to do with my current play style. I chose the theme because it would be easy to write about. I simply wanted to finish my degree,” Mitoma once told ESPN with an honesty all former under graduates can appreciate.
He gave an insight into his dribbling process too. "First, I look at the opponent's centre of gravity, posture, body movement, then I think about my options,” he said. Whatever he saw and thought with respect to Trent Alexander-Arnold, Mitoma got very little from the Liverpool defender.
He made nine tackles, which Squawka announced was the joint-most by a Liverpool defender in a league game since the summer of 2016. Per FBRef, no Reds player in any position has topped it from 2017/18 onwards. It sounds impressive, and it obviously beats being dribbled past, but it’s a metric which exists thanks to opponents on the ball attempting to go past the player. On Saturday, Alexander-Arnold was able to set a modern era tackling record for the club thanks largely to Mitoma.
That Brighton would attack in this way was to be expected. Teams have targeted the space on Liverpool’s right flank for years. With their Japanese winger sixth in the Premier League for take-ons completed since the start of his debut season, he was obviously going to play on the left to exploit any perceived defensive weakness that he could.
Mitoma tried to dribble past Alexander-Arnold seven times, succeeding only twice. Advantage, Trent. Based on his average success rate in the Premier League, you’d reasonably expect the Seagulls’ winger to complete three from seven.
But once you start reviewing footage, digging into the earth of the metrics, it becomes apparent that judging any player on statistics of this type is at best flawed, perhaps pointless.
As fans, we have an image in our head of what constitutes a dribble. You can visualise someone skipping by an opponent with the ball, leaving them in their wake. Here’s the first example from the match of Mitoma dribbling past Alexander-Arnold.
He doesn’t go past him at all, not really. Trent blocks Mitoma’s path in to the box, so he then goes away from goal to retain possession. From where he has the ball to where he releases it, the Brighton man technically goes past Liverpool’s number 66, just not in the sense you’d imagine if you simply read he’d been dribbled past. There is no close contact, no advantage gained.
This example is very reminiscent of many of the dribbles that occurred when Jérémy Doku recorded 12 successful take-ons against the Reds in a 1-1 draw at the Etihad last season. They don’t hurt the defending team, nothing of any consequence comes of them. Not that this is to say Alexander-Arnold was perfect against Mitoma on Saturday.
Now, that, that is being dribbled past. The below example is clearly also a tackle, at least in the sense of dispossessing a player trying to carry the ball past their opponent, if not a crunching challenge that might initially come to mind from the word.
What becomes swiftly apparent once you look into tackling data is that full-backs make a lot of them. Below is a map of the successful tackles made by Alexander-Arnold and Kostas Tsimikas on Saturday. Notice how a lot of them are near the touchline.
They often make tackles, at least in a statistical sense, by prodding the ball out of play for a throw-in or corner. These efforts are deemed successful, and ultimately they are, but it’s not as if possession is regained, just halted.
So, let’s not worry about tackle numbers. Let’s focus on Liverpool scoring an important, point-earning goal through a counter attack against a deep set defence for the second week running. Let’s highlight them topping the table with the best relative performance - points-per-game multiplied by opponents’ points-per-game - in the division. Finally, let’s congratulate Slot for making an excellent start to life with the Reds, however you choose to assess it.
This is why I detest the "not dribbled past" assessment that's shown up everywhere from Reddit to Squawka in recent years. It means nothing. People started attaching it to Virg when he first joined the club as some kind of assertion of his defensive dominance but it's not as if he's standing in place like an immovable object. Most of the time, he's guiding attackers away from the box in the same way Trent (who, y'know, can't defend) did to Mitoma. It's a fake "stat."
Points per game multiplied by opponents' points per game. Great metric and finally I can appreciate just how good we've been! Up the reds!