Ibrahima Konate is the exact reason Trent Alexander-Arnold must start
Real Madrid are playing some fluid football this season. After a pretty bad start to the campaign, it seems like Jose Mourinho is slowly but surely turning things around for the club, with so many big performances in the last few weeks.
Beating high flying Roma, Barcelona, Leipzig, Villarreal and Sevilla in a matter of a few weeks is huge, and it shows exactly how big the difference is between Real Madrid now when compared to them before the international break.
The players seem comfortable working with Jose Mourinho, and some of them finally look like they belong in one team, rather than having 11 individuals on the pitch together.
It is great to watch, but if there is one thing about this Real Madrid team that does not make too much sense, it is the use, or lack theoreof, of Trent Alexander-Arnold.
Trent Alexander-Arnold has not played much, but his chemistry with Ibrahima Konate is elite
Trent has only had a handful of minutes this season despite being comfortably better than his compatriot Denzel Dumfries. Even though Fede Valverde provides more two-way support than the Englishman these days, and we also have to consider the heirarchy of the Real Madrid captain - Trent has still been good enough for Los Blancos this season to warrant a second-option role.
In fact, had he started all of the games that Dumfries started early in the year, it would have been much better for Real Madrid because of the level of his talent as well as the problems that he single-handedly solves for the club.
Now, the thing with Trent is that it makes even more sense for him to play this season than it did last season, and that is down to the inclusion of Ibrahima Konate.
Konate has played with Trent for a number of seasons in the past, and has shown just how well he is able to manage the right side whenever the Englishman goes up to help his team's attack.
Konate has played on that side for so long that he is well aware of how to position himself should his team, in this case, Liverpool when he was with Trent, loses the ball. Having both of them on that side would have made the most amount of sense for Real Madrid simply because of the fact that the player knows what he is doing when there is so much space left to cover.
It is also worth noting that Trent has been better defensively than even Dumfries this season, and the limited involvement he has had this season has shown good defensive interventions, enough to not worry fans about overloading Konate like he was at Liverpool.
Jose Mourinho saw these two play together against Racing Santander, and it all worked out really well. Hopefully, that prompts him to give more of these minutes to the players because Trent, on his day, can solve almost every single build-up problem that Real Madrid have had since the retirement of Toni Kroos.
