Alexander-Arnold can prove Rooney wrong on England’s centre stage

This past week, Wayne Rooney declared that he “wouldn’t have Trent Alexander-Arnold anywhere near the middle of the pitch”. Which feels just a touch proscriptive, especially when you consider that – given the relatively modest distances involved – pretty much everywhere on a football pitch could be described as “near the middle of the pitch”. Presumably Alexander-Arnold’s role in a Rooney-coached team would be a highly bespoke corner-flag-to-corner-flag operation: shuttling up and down the right flank but bending his runs via the first few rows of the crowd, avoiding that all-important centre‑circle blast radius.

Of course, this was not the only reason Rooney’s comments struck a weirdly discordant tone. “I love him as a footballer and what he does on the ball,” Rooney explained. “But defensively he’s all over the place. He can’t defend.” Which, on the face of it, makes instinctive sense. Rooney wants his midfielders to be skilled in the defensive arts. Simple enough. Until you remember – with a certain irony – that just two Euros ago the defensive colossus Rooney was proposing in the crucial England creative midfield role was none other than Rooney himself.

Related: Serbia carry a Saudi Arabian flavour into their Euros clash with England

Yes, Wayne in midfield: anyone remember how that went? An arrangement strongly pushed by Rooney himself in the weeks before Euro 2016 and given irresistible momentum by the press and public. And eventually adopted – with what felt like a certain reluctance – by Roy Hodgson, whose archetypal central midfielder had always been a humble shin-painter like Dickson Etuhu or Jack Colback, a man who tried to build his Liverpool project around Christian Poulsen. Even at the time it felt like a crude expedient, a wilful unbalancing, a Garth Crooks BBC website team of the week made gaudy, frightening flesh.

Yet if you study the coverage before that tournament, Rooney’s defensive capabilities – or lack of, given he had literally spent his entire career up front – raised scarcely a flicker. All the talk was of passing range and late runs into the area.

Not that Rooney was by any means alone in this aspect. Go back through England tournament midfielders of the past decade and few if any seem to have been scrutinised for their ability to screen a defence or thwart a counterattack. Could an injured Jack Wilshere defend? How do you like Frank Lampard in a defensive transition?

The point is not that defending is irrelevant to the job. The point is that it is primarily a collective endeavour, and to home in on the individual skill set of one player – with what at times appears to be a laser-focused vindictiveness – risks missing the bigger picture. Virtually every serious international team recognises that you want your most creative passers where they can do most damage.

But they also need protection, engines around them, full-backs who can cover, a decent press to slow the ball down and forestall the one-on-one before it happens. Toni Kroos’s Germany get this. Rodri’s Spain get this. Kevin De Bruyne’s Belgium get this. Luka Modric’s Croatia get this. Jorginho’s Italy get this. And on the eve of their first group game against Serbia, there are signs that Alexander-Arnold’s England may be getting this, too.

Cue the screaming, cue the outrage. “Why would you make the best right-back in the world a midfielder?” Jürgen Klopp famously bristled in 2021, after a short-lived experiment by Gareth Southgate in a game against Andorra. Why, indeed? Three years on, not only has Alexander-Arnold been regularly deployed in midfield by Klopp himself, but he is poised to start a tournament game in that position for the first time.

And in any case the distinction between the two roles has long since begun to blur. Oleksandr Zinchenko spends most of his time in midfield. Kroos spends a lot of his time at left-back. Full-backs are the new playmakers, and centre-halves are the new full-backs. Above all there is a growing recognition that the very idea of position itself can often be a limiting exercise, a poor way of understanding what exactly players do and where they do it.

Take, say, Alexander-Arnold’s average position in qualifying, which was further up the pitch than those of any of England’s other midfielders, higher even than Jude Bellingham’s and not far off Harry Kane’s. Serbia operate a rugged back five, and so the main zone of interest will probably be around the edges of midfield. You have Bukayo Saka peeling off to the right. Declan Rice the safe recycling option. Phil Foden stretching play on the left, showing for an early cross or a clipped diagonal. Kane coming short. Bellingham slipping between the lines, making himself available for the one-two. Now: with this plethora of options in view, who do you want on the ball, playing the pass?

And of course with Alexander-Arnold the pass is never simply played, but measured. The difference here is roughly akin to that between a bartender and a mixologist. Kroos is feted for his pass completion statistics but to reduce him to a percentage is by far the most boring way of appreciating him. The unquantifiable part is how the pass is played: not just accurately but at the right time, at the right speed, with exactly the right roll and spin on the ball so that the receiver can take it in their stride rather than having to control, shaving off those vital half-seconds that turn a promising opening into a genuine chance. Alexander-Arnold doesn’t just pass, he creates, and in a tournament of thin margins these are the distinctions that matter more than ever.

Naturally there is also the curse of overfamiliarity, the price a player pays for simply being around long enough for his frailties to be exposed. Everyone has seen Trent getting “cooked” by Jérémy Doku or Marcus Rashford. But be honest: how much elite transition defending have you seen Adam Wharton do? How about Kobbie Mainoo? Conor Gallagher’s superb coverage belies a reading of the game and ball-winning ability that is no better than average. You don’t like the idea of teams running at Alexander-Arnold? Fine. Make sure they don’t.

In a way, the psychodrama over the England midfield is a kind of paradigm for this England team more generally, the tension between cynicism and optimism, between what a player can’t do and what he can, between the problem and the opportunity.

For Southgate, picking Alexander‑Arnold can be an emblem of his own evolution as a coach, a gradual brightening of outlook. For Alexander-Arnold himself, six years into a fitful international career, it would be a measure of his own impressive progress: tried and discarded, shifted and reimagined and now – seemingly – right back at the centre of things.