The Reds secured their spot in Monday night’s draw for round four after Jakub Kiwior’s own goal was followed up by a stoppage-time clincher from Luis Diaz at Emirates Stadium on Sunday.
Alexander-Arnold, who provided the delivery for the tie’s opener in the 80th minute, explained how some half-time adjustments helped the visitors see off the Gunners.
Read on for the vice-captain’s post-match interview with BBC Sport…
On the win…
Huge. We’ve got a lot of players missing today – lads on internationals, Virg missing from the squad and a lot of injuries as well. We came here with one objective – which was to win and get into the hat for the next round, and we’ve done that. We dug deep, two late goals. We changed things around at half-time internally and we came out and played football, created our chances. And the changes that we did make and the change in system and where players were playing really made an impact for us.
On the second-half tactical tweaks…
I think there were times in the first half where we were a little bit naïve, where we’ve got caught playing out from the back and they’ve had their chances from our mistakes and maybe a sloppy pass here and there. They’re a high-pressing team and they’re bound to do that. We stuck with the way that we wanted to play, we have an identity, we want to play football and use players’ strengths with the frontline that we had, obviously Harvey [we] wanted to get him on the ball. And then we’ve got Darwin and Lucho as well with speed, so we’re playing the balls in behind and giving them what they wanted as well. We mixed it up, Darwin went a little bit wider and Cody went in the centre – I think that really made a difference. We were able to use Darwin’s speed one-on-one with their full-back and he created a lot for us in the second half.
On his free-kick delivery for the opening goal…
Those ones, in-swingers, you just want to hit an area, you want to make it as difficult as possible. That’s the idea. Your aim is to make it as hard as possible for them to clear the ball and knowing that a flick from one of our players, one of their players could potentially go in. We’ve hit the woodwork a couple of times in the game as well. So, we had our chances and near the end of the game we put them away and won the game.
