England midfield role has been year in the planning, says Trent Alexander-Arnold

Trent Alexander-Arnold revealed he has been working on his midfield role with England over the last year as he lauded Declan Rice and Jude Bellingham for their performances alongside him in the Euro 2024 win over Serbia.

Arguably Gareth Southgate’s biggest decision before the Group C opener was who to deploy next to Rice in the centre of the pitch, with Alexander-Arnold given the nod over the likes of Conor Gallagher and Kobbie Mainoo.

England secured a 1-0 win courtesy of an early Bellingham header, with Alexander-Arnold’s performance splitting opinion as he was replaced by Gallagher with 20 minutes remaining in Gelsenkirchen.

A right-back at Liverpool, Southgate has been working on transforming Alexander-Arnold’s game on the international stage and the 25-year-old spoke after the win about the effort that has gone into the shift.

“I was prepared and not just through myself, but especially the manager and (assistant manager) Steve Holland have worked very hard over the past year for me to understand and know the role that I’m being asked to do,” he told beIN Sports.

“Not only that, I’m playing with two of the, if not the two best midfielders in football right now, in Declan and Jude. So I’m in good company when I’m in there, they’ve helped me.”

On his own display, Alexander-Arnold said his performance would be analysed ahead of the second group game against Denmark on Thursday.

He is likely to retain his place in a team that dropped off following a fast start against Serbia, something else he feels will be addressed ahead of the match in Frankfurt.

“I tried to contribute as much as I could for the team,” he added.

“I was told, it was explained what my role would be, trying to execute it to the best of my ability and contribute to the win.

“So hopefully the manager and staff will obviously analyse the game back and see it, but the most important thing is to win and hopefully I contributed to that.

“I think you could see from, especially the first 10, 15, 20 minutes, the fluidity, the way that we were playing, the excitement and the chances that we were creating, it just showed a glimpse of what we can do.

“We need to analyse why we couldn’t sustain that for the full 90 (minutes), but you have to take your hats off, we were playing a really difficult team.”