COMEDIAN Stewart Lee used to include, as part of his routine, a recollection of a conversation he once shared with a taxi driver.
The story, in his telling, went like this.
The taxi driver was an unrepentant homophobe. To be gay, he believed, was immoral. Lee tried to point out that morality is not a fixed thing, that it shifts with time.
As an example, he noted that many of our ideas of ethics can trace their roots to ancient Greece. And in ancient Greece, homosexual love was often venerated*, not abhorred.
The taxi driver listened, absorbed what Lee was telling him, and then said: “Well, you can prove anything with facts.”
Lee recalled being struck dumb by what he regarded as “the most brilliant way to win an argument.”
With that in mind, here are two facts. Few players in the Premier League are dribbled past more often than Trent Alexander-Arnold.
So far this season, only six players have been beaten by an opponent in a one-on-one situation more often than Alexander-Arnold, Liverpool’s rightback, according to data from Statsbomb. It happens roughly twice every three games, which admittedly does not seem like a lot, but still.
Inconveniently, Alexander-Arnold is also one of the best players in the Premier League at winning the ball back in defensive positions.
He is, according to the same Statsbomb database, ranked as the 20th-best outfield player for defensive regains.
He does it only marginally less often than Emiliano Martinez, the Aston Villa goalkeeper. And Martinez can use his hands.
Both of these sets of facts are true. But only one of them has been used to build what is, now, an established consensus.
Everyone knows that Alexander-Arnold is among Liverpool’s most fearsome attacking weapons. Only 24 players in 30 years of Premier League history have created more goals.
At 26, Alexander-Arnold can already be regarded as the most creative defender the league has ever seen.
At the same time, though, it appears to have been agreed that Alexander-Arnold is not a good defender. The only matter up for debate appears to be quite what that means: whether he is merely average or whether he is actively bad.
That dichotomy – that both of these things can be held up as true – can be attributed to two things. The first is the danger of football’s relatively sudden desire to quantify everything without fully understanding what the raft of numbers the sport generates means.
The figure that is so often used to damn Alexander-Arnold, the number of times a player is beaten on the dribble, is what analysts regard as a “counting statistic,” and a fairly basic one at that.
It exists, in other words, devoid of context. It is a raw number, out in the world alone.
Often, it is not entirely clear what constitutes being “dribbled past.”
Defenders have choices: They will sometimes allow an opponent to run away from them in order to retreat into a defensive shell. Knowing when not to engage is a skill, too.
More important, the statistic’s cold total does not tell you how many times that player was dribbled at during the course of a game. The same statistic is often used to illustrate the imperiousness of Alexander-Arnold’s captain, Virgil van Dijk.
He is rarely dribbled past. But that is, at least in part, because he is dribbled at just as rarely.
Expressed as a percentage, Alexander-Arnold’s figures are not nearly so striking. It might be enough, then, to suggest that we should all accept that sometimes fullbacks are beaten by wingers, and that it should not be treated as some moral failure when it happens.
But even that does not take into account the other great caveat.
Micah Richards, another player frequently told he was not an especially good rightback, remembers going through newspaper reports of his performances early in his career rather more than was advisable, trying to find out what people thought of him.
He stopped only when, flicking through one paper, he saw he had been given just 6 out of 10 for his display one week.
He had, the reporter noted, failed to offer much attacking threat. He had, in fact, “barely crossed the halfway line.”
It seemed an odd criticism to Richards. His coach, Roberto Mancini, had expressly told him not to venture too far forward.
Alexander-Arnold has the opposite problem. He has played most of his career under strict instructions to become part of Liverpool’s attack.
He is encouraged to drift into midfield, to find himself in positions in which he can hurt the opposition. That is how he became the most creative defender in the Premier League. It is what might yet earn him a move to Real Madrid.
But it has also meant that Alexander-Arnold is frequently criticised for being out of position. The reflex rebuttal is to suggest that he cannot be in two places at once, but even that is insufficient.
Alexander-Arnold is not out of position. It is just, more often than not, that he has been told to be in a place we do not expect him to be.
He is doing his job. His job just happens to involve more than just defending.
Still, the problem is that a consensus has taken hold about Alexander-Arnold, and it will not be denied, not by inconvenient evidence.
Thus far this season, Alexander-Arnold has roughly the same success rate at stopping one-on-ones as Kyle Walker, the Manchester City defender.
Walker, of course, is the player Alexander-Arnold is often told he should aspire to be. That might be true, but that’s the thing with facts: You can prove anything with them.
*I am compelled by the voices of those who had the misfortune of educating me to point out that this is probably an oversimplification. Different Greek cities had different moral codes at different times. In some of them, gender mattered less than class in determining which sexual relationships were considered permissible. — NYT
