Why ‘bad example’ Virgil van Dijk should get new contract ahead of Mo Salah…
Virgil van Dijk is setting a bad example to young footballers; winning elite matches is supposed to be hard work but he is doing it without breaking sweat. His shirt hasn’t needed a wash for weeks.
If Liverpool fans could spirit up only one new contract for their holy trinity of free agents, the majority would probably plump for an extension of Mo Salah’s guarantee of goals. The more business-minded amongst them might just conclude that Trent Alexander-Arnold’s youth represents a better long-term investment. I would argue that Van Dijk is the rock on which this title campaign is founded. He is the one essential ingredient.
Managers love a leader in their dressing room. When Alisson Becker punched away the first Manchester City cross into his box at the weekend, Van Dijk promptly held up his hands to suggest that a catch might have been more appropriate…held up his hands to tell arguably the best goalkeeper in the world how to keep goal. Alisson nodded his head in recognition. He caught the next one.
Van Dijk is an influencer. The man’s very presence on the field is noted by all 21 of the other players he shares it with. His own share of the pitch seems somehow greater than that of anyone else out there. He patrols it like an aristocratic landowner protecting his boundaries against would-be trespassers. Virgil doesn’t take kindly to intruders into Liverpool territory. How dare they cross the half-way line?
He can be a bit too cool for school. His insistence on making a very difficult job look like it’s wasting his precious time is possibly the only flaw in his make-up. When the City team-sheet dropped without sight of Erling Haaland’s name, you could almost hear Virgil sighing and asking himself if there was something better he might be doing with his afternoon. Omar Marmoush? Really?!
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Everyone loves a trier. There is something oddly not-to-like about the guys that are good and know it. It’s that Novak Djokovic, Virat Kohli, Antoine Dupont, Jude Bellingham ring of supreme confidence. It can seem like a sonic force-field shutting out the cuddly affection we feel for the players that kiss the badge and shed their blood and tears for it. Virgil doesn’t cry. I can’t ever remember seeing him sporting a silly bandage around a head wound. Not every man can get away with a hair bun.
He is Spock on Liverpool’s Enterprise. Defending but not as we know it, Captain. A stylist in bruiser territory. Even at the height of Jurgen Klopp’s heavy metal era, Van Dijk was still playing his mellow, chilled saxophone solos. He would wear slippers to play if Nike made them. His mission is to make the extraordinary seem ordinary. Nothing to see here.
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What is truly extraordinary is that Liverpool signed Van Dijk, Alisson and Salah in the space of 13 transformational months. Not until Marvel teamed up Deadpool and Wolverine was there a comparable recruitment drive. Van Dijk arrived as Mr Paradox; a super-hero to rescue Liverpool from a plague of mutant centre-backs like Klavan, Kyrgiakos and Sakho but to do so without the gnarly combat tactics that had endeared Carragher and Hyypia to the Kop. As befits a man whose name combines a poet and a painter, he turned heading, tackling and blocking into an artform. Virgil is fly.
Seven years on, Van Dijk, Alisson and Salah remain the three world-class talents in Arne Slot’s squad. He doesn’t want to lose any one of them… certainly not without due recompense. Replacements wouldn’t come cheap and – despite their high-flying season – it’s a Liverpool team that might need one or two other additions to sustain this heady pace over the coming years.
Maintaining standards will require more than fresh talent. It will need flag-bearers that have the personality and standing to set the tone and lay down ground rules for the others to follow. Liverpool have had a succession of strong captains to lead from the front in the modern era and Van Dijk’s value as a manager on the field is beyond ready reckoning.
The pick of his predecessors – Graeme Souness and Steven Gerrard – maybe had some issues with translating their serial competitiveness into man-management when they retired to the touchline. It’s not easy to drive yourself to the heights they both touched. It is even more difficult to understand and encourage people without the same SAS levels of motivation. Not when your job depends on them. Van Dijk’s super relaxed outward vibe might just act as a counterbalance to his inner restlessness to win.
We are yet to see him take to the field with his dogs but some of his performances have the air of a weekend afternoon stroll. I’m not aware that he’s ever yet stopped to text his wife during a match but he possesses that defining ability to create time to do things only when he’s ready even in a frantic game, so I think he’s entitled to take his phone out there with him just in case there is a lull in play. He could always do Wordle between opposition attacks if she’s not replying.
As an example to young centre-backs, he’s probably not the ideal one to try to copy. More of a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ kind of a leader. But if I was pushed to say which one of Alexander-Arnold, Salah or Van Dijk I wanted on my side, looking after me and my interests in my next game, I’m voting Virgil.
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