It has been a bruising, chastening few months for Arne Slot. But his reluctance to place any old square peg in the same shaped Liverpool hole deserves some credit.
“In general, if you don’t win a game, the players who aren’t playing become the best players in the squad,” he said earlier this week. “That’s the same everywhere in the world.
“This is an example of that as well,” the Dutchman added of one of the more absurd clamours of recent times: for Calvin Ramsay to rescue the Reds.
That groundswell of opinion, that small but loud surge of momentum pushing a player with three Liverpool appearances in four years to the first-team fore, is inevitable and not without just cause. As the last right-back standing at Anfield, many have framed him as the solution to an ongoing injury crisis.
But Slot has resisted the temptation thus far.
“I’ve chosen other players until now and that’s also what I’m going to do tomorrow,” he said before the Sunderland game, in which Wataru Endo was given the nod ahead of Ramsay.
The Japan international’s season might well be over due to an injury suffered in that victory, with Curtis Jones the next repurposed cab off the midfield rank.
It is ostensibly harsh on Ramsay, but also very possibly the kindest thing to do. The Scot has spent the last three seasons barely playing on loan at Wigan, Bolton and Kilmarnock, has a Liverpool first-team career comprised of 183 minutes and has never even played in the Premier League.
One read of Slot vowing “to protect all my players” is that he is a hypocrite for rejecting and overlooking Ramsay. Another is that he is sheltering someone who likely either isn’t ready or good enough, certainly not with Liverpool as unstable as they’ve been.
It is a cruel reality Slot has done well to realise and stand by, blocking out the noise from those who see a vacancy at right-back and figure, even in this multi-faceted world, that it must be filled by A Right-Back.
Jones opening the scoring in a morale-boosting FA Cup win over Brighton was not justification for his deployment there; that was his midfield muscle memory kicking in to time his run to perfection, meeting Milos Kerkez’s gorgeous delivery with a first-time finish.
But his all-round performance helping shut down that right side before Joe Gomez could take over for a breezy final 20 minutes underlined why Slot considers Ramsay “one of” his right-back choices, while having “better options to play” instead.
Dominik Szoboszlai might have forced a shift in that pecking order anyway; he is far too important not to play in a more prominent, decisive position, as his emphatic strike for the second goal showed.
But he will still likely be ahead of Ramsay along with a great many others when push comes to shove.
Slot putting the inexperienced Scot behind a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency box and having it double-glazed with as many midfielders as possible is simply the right call for both player and club.