Jurgen Klopp has rejected criticism of Trent Alexander-Arnold's defensive qualities following Liverpool's 2-0 win over Arsenal on Thursday night.
Alexander-Arnold supplied two assists for match-winner Diogo Jota as Klopp's side booked a place in their first Carabao Cup final for six years at the Emirates.
The right-back also helped secure a second successive clean sheet against the Gunners across the two legs, dealing with the lively Gabriel Martinelli with aplomb in north London.
Klopp said the West Derby-born defender is a unique player in the Liverpool system as he moved to dismiss claims that Alexander-Arnold's defensive displays are not up to standard.
“I don’t know anybody who is like Trent, who is a right-back and is that decisive and influential and all these kinds of things," Klopp said.
“I heard again last night on the bus on the way home, the television is on and you hear people talking. And I really don’t like always when they mention [about Trent] 'yes, his defending, defensively he’s not that good, but he’s offensively he's better.'
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“I thought he did outstandingly well defensively last night. Little [Gabriel] Martinelli, we will talk about this player in the future I can promise.
"If he is without major injuries he will have a proper career, so it’s really good what Trent did there against him.
"He kept him busy defensively, and where he showed up, the package of Trent is insane.
"It’s not that he delivers every day, so there are still departments where can improve and he has to improve and we will work on them and I will not stop telling him, but yeah the package is really interesting I have to say.
"I am not sure what it means [for him] in history, there is still 15 years or whatever time to play and to create and to score and to learn and improve.
"But the last five years were a good start in a career I would say.”
After securing a Wembley showdown with Chelsea next month, the Reds boss also talked up Fabinho's importance to the team, detailing how the need to field him as an emergency centre-back hurt the midfield last term.
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Klopp added: “Fab is not overlooked by us. I don’t know what you saw or overlooked or whatever.
"Again, I think it was Jamie Redknapp who said last night ‘for Trent last year it was really difficult because Virgil was not there’.
"And Joel Matip and Joe Gomez are just the same. I don’t know why we have to mention that all the time, how short can the memory be?
"We played Hendo and Fabinho at centre-half, so that is of course not exactly how it should be.
"I thought they played really well and did really good games there, but obviously it costs you stability and you can not win in the mid or long-term football games without stability. It's not possible.
"You can win a football game, because the opponent 20 times hits the post and the cross bar - so you can win it, but it’s nothing to do with yourself or your stability.
“It is just because you are lucky. But if you want to win it because you are the better team then you’d better have stability - and we had no stability, couldn’t have. That was the situation.
“How good Fabinho is, you saw last night, but he is not a machine because the last two games are not like he played all the other games, they played against Chelsea like they were on the same level.
"We are all human beings, but the quality he has is absolutely incredible.
"And if he is at his best and is in the centre of that pitch, yes then that is very, very helpful, because then you can think about a lot of other things.
"How you can organise the protection is completely different because you can rely on different things.
"If you don’t have that you organise the protection differently but it is completely out of the box because we usually do it like this, but then everything has to change because he’s not there.
“That needs time, which you don’t get in the Premier League. That was our problem last year.
"No, we didn’t overlook it, if you didn’t overlook it I don’t know.”
