Trent Alexander-Arnold is playing a dangerous game – here’s how he can leave Liverpool and preserve the legacy he claims to value so highly, writes IAN HERBERT

It must be said that Trent Alexander-Arnold was not the first Liverpool player to feel the wrath of his own supporters when he was met with howls of derision at Anfield on Sunday.

Just ask Alan Kennedy and Phil Neal, legends who never left, about the groans that would come from the Kemlyn Road Stand on a Saturday afternoon when they weren’t at their best. The old place has always had strict standards.

But that doesn’t change the fact that there are some cold, hard truths about what will happen next if, as seems likely, Alexander-Arnold doesn’t sign a new contract and part ways with Anfield. Liverpool will lose some of their love for him. He will not be remembered as he could have been. A legacy will be tarnished. It will hurt.

Liverpool is the kind of city that makes things different for local players. A place where it’s ‘us against the world’, where they care for their own country, nurture their own stars, and – because it should be reciprocal – where the process of leaving, if not handled with subtlety and thoughtfulness, will always seem like a betrayal.

When Steven Gerrard was deciding whether to leave for Chelsea in 2004 – a process of such anxiety that he poured paracetamol down his throat and called a family friend who was a doctor to help calm him down – he sat at home in a daze watching fans burn an old GERRARD 17 jersey near the Shankly Gates. And he hadn’t even remotely courted that team. Gerrard revealed years later that he had asked himself: ‘Can I look at myself in the mirror again? To leave would seem like a betrayal.”

Michael Owen felt the fear too. He tells how he drove to the city’s John Lennon Airport crying and wondering, “What have you done?” after signing for Real Madrid in 2004, having made a loose agreement with CEO Rick Parry that he would be back in a season or so – just like Ian Rush, who Liverpool decided to sell to Juventus in 1986. Leaving Liverpool. “I never asked for Real Madrid to fill in for me and I never promoted myself,” Owen would later reflect.

Things were never the same between him and Liverpool. Not even Steve McManaman, who single-handedly won two cup finals for the club but is hardly remembered for the way he also left Anfield for Real Madrid in 1999.

The person with the deepest perspective on all this is Jamie Carragher, who, after watching those two friends of his become estranged from Liverpool, heard Gerrard’s personal anguish about whether to stay or go, if they roomed together. “Think of McManaman,” he told him. ‘Maybe you will win something, but in Liverpool no one will worry about that.’

Carragher tells this in an interview for the book Ring of Fire, author Simon Hughes’ excellent telling of the Liverpool story from the early 2000s, and qualifies it with the consideration that Alexander-Arnold is no doubt now considering.

“On the other hand, if you stay too long, you get people saying, ‘You’re nice. You’re done once you’re 30 and you’ve had a few bad games,” he told Gerrard.

So it is not an easy task for this 26-year-old, who has been playing for Liverpool since he was six. But what Alexander-Arnold can control is how he handles his departure – and so far there is little evidence that he realizes that.

So far he has dealt with cryptic messages, in the utterly depressing modern way. Informing a broadcaster that he would rather win a Ballon d’Or than win another Champions League. Celebrating a goal at West Ham with a ‘chat’ gesture that appeared to mock the discussion about his future. It doesn’t match the message on the mural of him at Anfield – ‘I’m just a normal boy from Liverpool whose dream has come true’ – and it’s a dangerous game he’s playing. Fine if Liverpool continues to rack up wins. Less, if not.

Some have suggested since Sunday that the fans who expressed negative feelings towards him were wrong. Nonsense of course. No player can expect a free pass at Anfield, no matter what achievements he has made. Every Liverpool player who seemed less involved than he should has heard about it from himself over the years.

There is a route through all of this. A way to leave Liverpool that wouldn’t be discordant. Sign a new contract with a realistic buyout clause so that when Real Madrid return this summer, Liverpool will take something away to reinvest.

In an interview with the Men in Blazers podcast on December 19, Alexander-Arnold said that the ultimate personal ambition was to leave “a legacy”, explaining that this meant being “spoken of with the highest regard, especially after I finished… of the best right back, or the best right back.”

Staying where you are certainly offers the greatest guarantee of legacy, as Sir Kenny Dalglish, whose name now appears on the Kemlyn Road Stand, can attest.

“I never entertained the idea of ​​going abroad just because I was afraid,” Dalglish said years after his retirement. He wasn’t sure he could master the language or master the locker room banter in Spain or Italy, he said, so he stayed put and had no regrets. It was a different world then.

David Moyes OBE should get more love

There was a rich irony in the fact that David Moyes was appointed OBE in the New Year Honors list just as West Ham’s folly in replacing him with the dismal Julen Lopetegui reached its optimum point.

Moyes says he is not done yet, but does not want to play another role in the fight against relegation.

That doesn’t seem to rule out the idea of ​​a return to Everton, a club now limited to gaining one point per game, with eight clean sheets in the last ten, and struggling against any team that lets them have the ball.

Don’t hold your breath, though. Moyes’ lack of appreciation is one of the great management mysteries.

International cricket is in danger of drowning in its own greed

There is mounting evidence that international cricket is drowning in its own greed, with proposals for a two-tiered Test cricket system meaning the Ashes would be contested twice every three years – and therefore dismissed as a spectacle.

Those who will inevitably suggest that the market should dictate – and that Britain, India and Australia are right to make money among themselves rather than pushing their boundaries – might want to consider the work that Ireland has done.

That country has greatly increased its turnover and the quality of its game. The Big Three Cartel hardly wanted to know.

The BBC documentary series on the London bombings of July 2005 brings back memories of reporting on those events for The Independent from the Holbeck area of ​​Leeds, near Elland Road, where three of the suicide bombers came from.

Leeds United was involved in important community work at the time, amid the controversy over the merger of a local, largely white school with its predominantly Asian neighbour.

The cross-disciplinary project focused on the life of Albert Johanneson, a black footballer from South Africa who played for Leeds but died in poverty and obscurity. It was a great success.

Four days before the school merger took place, the bombs went off, leaving Leeds back to square one. One of the countless tragedies of those dark days.