Despite not yet turning 22, his birthday less than two months before this season’s Champions League final, Harvey Elliott is something of a veteran of this Liverpool squad.
By Jack Lusby, ThisIsAnfield.com
But despite already making 128 appearances for the first team – thus triggering the majority of the clauses worked into the £4.3 million deal that brought him from Fulham in 2019 – there is a sense that he is yet to fully convince Arne Slot.
With the Premier League’s halfway point reached in the 2-2 draw with Manchester United, Elliott reached mid-season having only started one game – that being the 2-1 win over Southampton in the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup in mid-December.
After featuring in the second-most games of any Liverpool player last season (53) and forcing Jürgen Klopp to admit he wished he’d started him more often, the 21-year-old has only played nine times under Slot so far.
Eight of those nine appearances have come in the last 10 games and in the seven of those outings that came from the bench he averaged only seven minutes on the pitch; his longest, at 16 minutes, came when Liverpool were already 4-0 up at West Ham.
That can, of course, be partly explained by a fractured foot suffered in training with England’s under-21s in September, an issue which kept the playmaker out for two months.
But ahead of a likely second start of the season against League Two strugglers Accrington Stanley in the FA Cup third round, it is hard to escape the feeling that, if he were to figure prominently in Slot’s plans, his reintegration would have been accelerated.
The Dutchman has effectively admitted as much, explaining of Elliott’s peripheral role at the beginning of January: “The ones that have played a lot under me, it is easier to come back after an injury than the ones that didn’t because the ones that played under me, I know what I can expect from them and I know what they bring to the team.
“With the ones, for example, Harvey, he was injured after two games I think. But he is also in competition with many good midfielders who are doing really well so that makes it hard for him to get playing time at the moment.”
At face value, it is a reasonable explanation, but there are aspects that don’t exactly wash.
For starters, Elliott was a staple of Slot’s first pre-season in charge of the club: no player clocked more minutes (290), made more assists (two), created more chances (nine) or played more passes into the final third (26).
It seemed throughout Liverpool’s warmup schedule that the youngster could fit seamlessly into the new head coach’s setup, with a more natural No. 10 built into Slot’s nominal 4-3-3 shape.
But the return of Dominik Szoboszlai, Alexis Mac Allister and Ryan Gravenberch from summer international duty, along with Elliott’s prolonged spell on the sidelines, have shunted the No. 19 down the pecking order; only Curtis Jones, who was required to fill in as a deep-lying midfielder at the start of the summer, has broken into that established unit.
However, with Szoboszlai sidelined through illness in the last two games and Jones struggling against both Manchester United (2-2 draw) and Tottenham (1-0 loss), that Slot still did not turn to Elliott may be telling.
Slot only made four changes to his starting lineup for the Carabao Cup semi-final opener at Tottenham on Wednesday night, with Conor Bradley, Jarell Quansah, Kostas Tsimikas and Diogo Jota coming in, but he retained his midfield trio of Gravenberch, Mac Allister and Jones.
Even in a game of little quality and certainly less control than Liverpool usually enjoy, both Gravenberch and, most notably, Jones played the full 90 minutes – Mac Allister only withdrawn after 80 minutes as Wataru Endo moved from centre-back to midfield.
Elliott spent a night he will have been hoping to start on the pitch as an unused substitute – the first time in eight games that he did not get the call-up, but perhaps the most significant occasion.
Instead Jones was left to toil away, safe in his passing (completing 45 of 47, or 96%) but failing to create a single chance or attempt a shot on goal, on a night where Liverpool really needed a spark to establish a lead going into the second leg at Anfield.
The visit of Accrington Stanley will almost certainly be one for Liverpool’s second string, and Elliott’s status among those is belying the unique ability he can offer as one of Slot’s No. 10s.
Though of shorter stature than either Szoboszlai or Jones and therefore lacking the same natural running power of Slot’s regular options in that advanced role, that is not to suggest that Elliott lacks the endeavour or off-ball grit required.
And more importantly, he arguably offers more thrust and, crucially, productivity in the final third; admittedly his sample size is small at just 147 minutes this season, but he has averaged 7.14 shot-creating actions per 90 in that time.
In a different system and under a different manager last term, Elliott averaged 4.72 shot-creating actions per 90 – similar to Szoboszlai (4.74), considerably more than Jones (2.77) and the sixth-most of Klopp’s regular starters, the highest being Luis Díaz (5.40).
Only Mo Salah (14) and Darwin Núñez (13) assisted more goals than Elliott last term (11), which is perhaps the clearest indicator of what he can offer as the creative outlet in Slot’s midfield.
That will no doubt have informed those clubs reportedly considering a move for the Englishman in January, with Sky Sports crediting both Dortmund and Brighton with interest in a deal.
But more importantly it should be of paramount interest to Slot at Liverpool.
The hope is that this is simply a longer-term bedding-in process and that the new head coach has not already decided a player who has invested so much into his life at Anfield is not the profile of midfielder he needs.
“With the games coming thick and fast, it’s now just about practising the new style of play that we’ve learned with the gaffer and how we’re going to keep applying it in games,” Elliott explained of his marginal role in a recent interview.
“It’s completely different to what we used to play before, so it’s like if you’re performing, if you’ve got a show, you keep going over and rehearsing it and rehearsing your lines or your part of the play.
“That’s kind of what we’re doing at the moment. We just keep going over and over things and making sure we’re getting it to a tee, really.”
Only time will tell, starting with Accrington Stanley on Saturday, but Elliott clearly deserves the opportunity to prove on a bigger platform why he has earned the nickname of Liverpool’s little diamond all over again.
(Cover image from IMAGO)
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