Arne Slot didn’t need to do it; he wasn’t even asked about it — but he chose to dig Trent Alexander-Arnold out in his final pre-game press conference of the season.
There was no malice in the remark; it was said with the Dutchman’s usual charm. It’s highly unlikely, though, that Slot would have chosen to offer up a negative critique of Alexander-Arnold without being asked for one if the right-back wasn’t on the brink of leaving the club.
Slot was asked whether he had spoken to Alexander-Arnold about the reaction that he received upon his last appearance for the club, when he was booed as he entered the field as a second-half substitute against Arsenal earlier this month.
“I talk to most players, not on a daily basis, but a lot,” Slot responded. “If there are circumstances why I should talk to them, you talk a bit more often to them. It’s clear with Trent’s situation that those circumstances are there for me to talk more with him than with Virgil, for example.
“I am talking to him as a human being. That, combined with winning something together, creates a different bond to the one the fans have with him. I do talk to him, quite a lot actually — although, when we started pre-season, he was in my office quite a lot as well for other reasons.”
Unsurprisingly, Slot was pressed further by a journalist in attendance at the AXA Training Center about what the last part of that answer meant, and he wasn’t shy in giving a response.
“He is going to leave either way so why not say it? Maybe it is a first gift I can give to Xabi Alonso! I wasn’t completely happy with every minute of how he was on the training ground. In certain moments, I felt he could do a bit more, to say it mildly. That is what we talked about.
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“I told him, ‘you are a much better defender than people tell you, but you don’t show it all the time.’ I said, ‘if you are at it and concentrated, there are not many players who can go around you’. Because he is fast, agile, has a great mentality but it is about showing that every single game.”
Had Slot not commented — unprompted — about how often Alexander-Arnold had been in his office in the first place, the information would not have come to light.
As casual as Slot’s comments were, they were always going to be the standout quotes from the press conference, and he knew that; they are all over news websites and social media, and they will no doubt take up significant space in the sports sections of Saturday’s newspapers. Slot knew what he was doing, but only he knows the reason why chose to say what he said.
