The safer approach would be merely to look for incremental improvement, to eye the dotted line that traditionally separates the European elite from the rest, to say the objective for Liverpool’s season was simply to return to the Champions League. But then, as anyone who has seen Trent Alexander-Arnold pass a ball knows, he can eschew the risk-free option. There is ambition to his distribution; to his rhetoric, too.
“Our aim as a team is to win the league and that’s the aim again this season,” said the Liverpool vice-captain. And if he was neither saying Liverpool will win the Premier League or are the favourites to do so, the right-back is unafraid of setting a lofty target. “Our ambition is to be as successful as possible and to maximise the potential we have got as a team and as a club,” he added. “At the start of last season it was the same as at the start of this season: our ambition was to win the league. We were nowhere near good enough to get anywhere near that last year and that’s where we needed to put it right this year.”
