Virgil van Dijk – From Superhero to Mortal

From being undeniably the best centre-back in world football and finishing second in the Ballon d’Or to getting dropped by 34-year-old Ivan Perisic, it’s been quite a ‘fall’ from grace for Virgil Van Dijk. I use the word fall partly in jest because the Dutchman is still clearly world-class and one of the best centre-backs in world football. Yet, there is obviously a difference between the man mountain he was in 2018-2019, to the mortal he is now. He gets dribbled past, he is sometimes out of position, and he seems allergic to blocking anything inside the box. I guess the question is, what happened to Virgil?

At the peak of Van Dijk’s powers, there were some calls from the Twitterverse calling him the best centre-half in history. I am sure football Twitter had seen Paolo Maldini, Franco Baresi and Fabio Cannavaro all at their peak and came to this rational conclusion. Ignoring Twitter’s habit of extremes, in my opinion, he was certainly the best centre-half I had ever seen. He was playing in an extremely high line, was able to play 70-yard diagonal passes to the right-wing like his last name was Pirlo and was never dribbled past. Seriously, for 50 games in the 2018/2019 season, no one could get past this Dutch Destroyer.

I know it sounds weird to talk about the downfall of a player who is still arguably one of the best in the world in his position, but those are the standards that Van Dijk had set for himself at Liverpool. The first point I must add is that ex-Celtic man did suffer from an ACL injury which cut his 2020-2021 season short. This was from a horror tackle by Jordan Pickford who planted his studs on an unaware Van Dijk and thus ruled him out for an entire season. But then again, this was Virgil. He had outpaced Adama Traore, stifled many wingers and shut down strikers from all over the world. It just seemed natural that he would be the same when he came back.

Yet, unlike what he showed us at Liverpool, he was in fact, human. He always had a reactive style of defending. Instead of taking everyone out and leaping to a tackle, he was calm and measured in how he defended. He prefers jockeying and matching attackers’ stride patterns and then using his body to ultimately dispossess attackers. Due to the ACL, he is not as quick-footed as he was beforehand, meaning he can get beat more 1 v 1 like the recent dribble by Perisic, in which Van Dijk got sat down and Perisic then assisted Harry Kane. (You can see thishere).