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This article is part of Football FanCast's In Numbers series, which takes a statistical look at performances, season-long form and reported transfer targets...

Liverpool right-back Trent Alexander-Arnold's shaky start to the season continued despite his side's 2-1 win against Southampton at St Mary's on Saturday.

Reds supporters on Twitter were concerned by what they were seeing from the 20-year-old during pre-season, and it's fair to say things haven't improved since the campaign got underway.

The 5 foot 9 England international picked up a 4/10 rating from This is Anfield for his Community Shield display against Manchester City having been beaten far too easily down his flank by the likes of Leroy Sane and Gabriel Jesus, before being replaced by Joel Matip in the 67th minute.

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He may have picked up an assist in the opening day 4-1 Premier League success against Norwich City at Anfield, but he was still "exposed" from a defensive point of view, as per The Liverpool Echo.

The youngster was then dropped for the Super Cup clash against Chelsea with Joe Gomez taking his place, before returning to the starting XI on the south coast at the weekend.

Things didn't really go to plan for Alexander-Arnold, especially when you compare his statistics to fellow full-back Andrew Robertson's.

His passing accuracy was more than 13% worse than the Scot's even though he had 36 fewer touches of the ball across the 90 minutes, as per WhoScored, while he failed to complete a single dribble and was only accurate with one of his 14 crosses, compared to a one in four record for the former Hull City man.

The heat map from the clash suggests that the Liverpool players have noticed that the usually effective partnership between the Englishman and Mo Salah isn't quite there yet right now, with the majority of their attacking play coming down the opposite flank through Robertson and Sadio Mane.

That makes complete sense too when you consider how many touches they each had at St Mary's, which suggests they were less likely to give him the ball on the day.

Alexander-Arnold hardly shone defensively either as he failed to make a single successful tackle, while he was given all sorts of problems by tricky substitute Moussa Djenepo, picking up a yellow card for fouling the Mali international.

Hardly convincing then and he is yet to reach the same levels he did for Liverpool last term. If he fails to find some form soon, a spell out of the starting XI needs to be considered.

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