Trent Alexander-Arnold believes Liverpool ‘created enough chances’ to defeat Leeds on Saturday night despite falling to a 2-1 defeat.
Jesse Marsch’s side inflicted the first home defeat on the Reds for 18 months as goals from Rodrigo and Crysencio Summerville either side of a Mo Salah effort lifted them out of the Premier League’s relegation zone.
The FA Cup champions now have two league games remaining before the campaign is disrupted by the Qatar World Cup and the defender has suggested that the break could in fact benefit his side.
“It’s difficult to take,” the England international told Liverpoolfc.com. “You never want to lose at home – something we pride ourselves on. For us, we want to win as many games as we can. It’s a disappointing result. We created enough chances to go and win that game but in football you get punished for not taking your chances. We’ve been punished.
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“It’s just one of those things,” the No. 66 added. “I think we are not in the greatest run of form – I think a lot of players would say that about themselves and as a team in general. But we’re still creating our chances, we’re still creating opportunities to score goals and win games. But we just haven’t been able to take them, especially [in the] last two Premier League games.
“I think it’s important for us to regroup, assess what’s going wrong. I think right now, it’s kind of, ‘Pick up as many points as you can now going into this break.’ And potentially this break will come at a decent time for us to reset and be able to get our heads straight to go into the second half of the season.”
Despite Liverpool currently finding themselves ninth in the table and eight points behind fourth-placed Newcastle, Alexander-Arnold insists that the players still remain full of belief about what they can achieve this term.
The 24-year-old admitted that ‘something’s not going right’ at the club but is already looking forward to next weekend’s huge clash with Spurs in the capital.
“I’d say we all believe in ourselves, we believe in the way we play, we believe in the squad and what we can achieve. But I think when you do get setbacks, it can potentially make you second-guess yourself and question things.
“Clearly as a team something’s not going right, it’s not going as well as we want it to go. That’s something for everyone to think about, that’s something for everyone to address and make sure we put it right, especially next week against Spurs, top-four rivals. We kind of need to go there and get some points if we’ve got any chance of reaching our aims and aspirations for the season.”
If we lose to Antonio Conte’s side then you can almost certainly rule us out of the title race and at the moment it’s looking like a top four finish is the best we can hope for.
The Scouser is right to point out that something isn’t quite right at the moment.
Too many of our stars are underperforming and it looks as if there’s very little confidence amongst the group.
From going so close to completing a glorious quadruple last term to finding ourselves in our current state is a huge concern.
We need to start performing as soon as possible to ensure this season isn’t a failure.