Only Virgil van Dijk is ahead of one Liverpool player who claims he is “improving” in a crucial area, according to the team’s statistics.
There are inevitabilities in Alexis Mac Allister’s game in the base of the Liverpool midfield given that he plays mostly as a number eight.
Only four players in the Premier League have committed more fouls than Mac Allister thus far, and on occasion, he has had to drag opponents down after being left behind by an initial burst of speed. Some of those might be physical.
But one crucial area where he has up till now excelled is ball interception. With 12, he is second only to Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk (13) in the league overall for this metric, and he is seventh among midfielders.
When tackles and interceptions are added together, Mac Allister moves up to eighth position overall (34), surpassing Declan Rice (31) of Arsenal, one of the league’s and possibly the world’s top defensive midfielders.
The Argentine mostly struggled on Sunday as he visited his old team Brighton, making a mistake that resulted in the Seagulls’ opening goal. However, one notable accomplishment was his match-high six interceptions. Andrew Beasley of Liverpool.com claims that the last time one of Jürgen Klopp’s players put up this kind of volume in a Premier League game was during the Reds’ 2-0 victory over Leicester in February. That was 607 days and 61 games ago.
While Mac Allister did break up play and halt the opposition’s attacks in this instance, interceptions are more important as a strategy for maximising the effectiveness of the Liverpool press.
The previous number six, Fabinho, was one of the greatest at this when he was in his peak because he knew just where to position himself to block the opposition’s escape route as it attempted to play out, maintaining Liverpool’s dominance.
At the Amex, Mac Allister picked up a Lewis Dunk clearance around the halfway line, played the ball onto Dominik Szoboszlai, and started the move that resulted in Mohamed Salah’s equaliser. This was a blatant nod to the Brazilian. He had, in a sense, atoned for his earlier error.
His aggressive but shrewd positioning was continued by the fact that half of his interceptions during the game were made in the Brighton half.
As a holding midfielder, the 24-year-old is undoubtedly imperfect, but plays like this support his assertion that he is constantly improving.
“I like [the role],” he said to LFCTV following the game. “I think I improved a lot in the last couple of years, defensively, and I think it’s a job I can do well.”