give over for feck sake. Your medical staff is so incredible that it can prevent or heal the sort of impact injuries that every team suffers one way or another over the course of a season?Virgil van Dijk | Performances
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik and Imran hold a long overdue conversation about United's awful league form with 1 win in 7. They discuss a disappointing draw at Bournemouth, a not so disappointing draw against Liverpool and a crushing defeat at Chelsea - Is time nearly over for Erik Ten Hag?
Then in a special second half of the pod, Nik welcomes Natalie ( https://twitter.com/natalie_17) to discuss the fortunes of Manchester United Women as they booked a place in the FA Cup Final after a historic first ever win vs. Chelsea.
give over for feck sake. Your medical staff is so incredible that it can prevent or heal the sort of impact injuries that every team suffers one way or another over the course of a season?City have all the horse placenta nature can offer and they regularly have long term injuries.
Fabinho's long term role seems to be as a center back. Thiago's arrival and Van Dyke's injury would just accelerate that transition.
Yeah.
Villa was easy on paper.
No of course not. But you can't deny that our players are more durable than most other teams in the league. Whether you attribute that to better guidance/medical staff or just pure dumb luck is up to you, but I'd say it's a mix of both probably. Better conditioning and injury prevention is a real thing.
You don't buy an Aguero and expect him to be fit for 90% of your games either.
We have had them too - Alisson, Fabinho, Oxlade-Chamberlain, Henderson, Keita, ... Just not to our best 3 players and that's why our "INCREDIBLE INJURY LUCK" is always highlighted, while that's just not true.
Not sure if serious.
Alisson is a weird one, I wouldn't call him injury prone but you can nearly guarantee he will be injured for a month or two every season - I remember Rooney being similar for us.
Really sucks for Van Dijk. Reminds me of when Vidic was the best CB in the world, but tore his ACL at a similar age. Came back in 12/13 and had an alright season but nowhere near the same, and became very injury prone. Hard to come back from an injury like that, at that age.
Well, Liverpool were terrible. Nothing paper can do about that. Same with United against Tottenham. Sh*t is sh*t no matter who you play.
That being said, VVD has been well below standards lately.
That’s a serious loss of physicality and mobility then. Fabinho is quite slow and far from strong. Good player, but is he suited to regularly playing as a CB?
Not as far as I'm concerned. As you say, he isn't particularly strong and isn't exactly a beast in the air either. Dm is the perfect position for him.
So Liverpool have a 75% win rate with van Dijk in the team and a 40% win rate without. I think they are in trouble and quite frankly with the abuse I've got from Liverpool supporters the past couple of years I'm delighted for them.
How is the way he got injured being reported in Holland?
I reckon you can take at least 20 points off Liverpool's points tally from last season now. Title race wide open. City out and out favourites.
Me too, I wouldn`t wish injury on any player but as he is already injured I hope the team is affected massively by him being out and struggle big time . This could be the start of the RAWK meltdown thread becoming great again.
Agree with this. He used to play rb? Must have been skinned by fast wingers quite often, I can imagine.
Imagine playing against Kane and the difference of having VVD or Fabinho marking him.
He’d be the words best 5 a side keeper. Such a springy and reactive little scrote.
I feel for him. I also think Ancelotti will turn him into a world class keeper
...... IF he’s humble and willing enough to do a year as an understudy and put in the required work to get better.
It’s not just the notable mistakes. The lad looks like a Jack Russell on crack. Never stops moving. So impatient. Even for the Liverpool disallowed goal he made an error. He always looks like he’s trying to commit to doing something. Literally the opposite of van Der Saar. Maybe he has to as he’s quite small. But he’s too busy even when standing still.
Everton would do well to throw small money at us for Romero. He’d be their number one for one-two years, or until Pickford got it together.
Thread has been great since Saturday, will peak again shortly when the FA announce no charges to Pickford. I'm enjoying it while I can because lord knows what will happen with our next few games.
The one thing is that they have been leaking goals this season with van Dijk, I think the league will be decided on goals scored. But yeah, they certainly will find it tougher now. Teams will fancy their chances a lot more, the cloud of invincibility surrounding them has blown away over the past six months.
They will be fine, United and city had more long term injuries to key players. It's law of averages they finally get one of their own, next we will be seeing less VAR and opposition mistakes favoring them this season.
He's played every single Premier League game for Liverpool since joining them so it seems a pretty meaningless stat.
And their league form has been incredible since he joined, but I expect that will not be the case without him. Hardly a meaningless stat.
True, Fabinho isn't as fast as someone like Gomez, but he did an excellent job matching up to Werner's speed in the first half of their game against Chelsea. He might not be as strong as someone like Matip, but this ball distribution skills from defense would be very valuable. Right now, a midfield of Wijnaldum, and Henderson are better suited to the midfield shuttler roles and Thiago and Fabinho seem to be competing for the DM role. Moving him to their defense adds more composure and passing quality at the expense of speed, which doesn't seem like a bad trade-off.
I would need to check but would guess that the 40% win rate without him is probably in League Cup games or CL dead rubbers, where they dropped the whole team and played a bunch of kids.
Probably is the case, but the point still stands - Liverpool will miss him massively and I would expect them to drop points without him.
Oh yeah, definitely. I don’t think they’d have dropped points against Everton for starters.
Danny Murphy said on MOTD2 last night that VVD was the best center half he's ever seen, the only logical explanation I can come up with is he's only ever seen Liverpool players.
They conceded from two headers which is something van Dijk is very good at dealing with.
He is a Scouser himself, in fairness. He's a fantastic player but I do think it helps his repuatation that he's the only world class CB in the league, in fact there's actually not that many top class CBs in general any more. If he was in another generation he'd still be considered world class but he wouldn't garner as much hype as he has. I know Liverpool fans keep trying to convince us he's better than Terry, Ferdinand and Vidic but I don't see it myself, I think people have just forgotten how brilliant those three were.
Werner lacks top speed and made some bad runs; he veered too far to the left which meant that Fabinho could just keep straight and cut him off.
I agree that his passing will be a bonus, but his lack of physicality will be an issue. Thiago is not as mobile as Hendo or Wijnaldum, so can Pool keep a high line with such a set up?
I love the mental gymnastics of some Liverpool supporters. Last year he was the bestest ever centre half to play in the premier league, Balon Dor worthy . Now they are saying that their defensive record this season is crap even with Van Dijk who hasn`t been playing that well himself as if in some way they won`t miss him that much.
If he is as good as they were claiming last year then they will miss him.
If he is as good as they were claiming last year then they will miss him.
He has always been as good as we said he was (imo), but this season we simply looked more vulnerable as a defensive unit, so that's also on Van Dijk. Actually it's been like that since the corona restart but at least last season we could write that down to us having already won the league hence being less concentrated defensively. He was still very good but not at his untouchable level of 18/19 and the beginning of the 19/20 season until New Year-ish.
There is no way to know just how much we will miss him since he hasn't missed a minute in the PL since January 2018 for us so no way to predict how we'll look defensively without him. Given that he's a great CB and given that we've already looked beatable at the back this season, I'd say it's a pretty safe bet though to predict that we'll miss him dearly and that we might have to go back to our "just outscore them" tactics of the 17/18 season.
I think the rules regarding retroactive banning are a bit dumb. It was obviously a red and a 2-3 match ban. The outrage is a bit much for the kind of foul though. It wasnt the worst challenge in history. Though the serious injury it resulted in does explain the explosion of anger on Pool's side.
Id be fuming too if it were Steven Berghuis being out for 7 months honestly.
Id be fuming too if it were Steven Berghuis being out for 7 months honestly.
That is what I am hoping for , one of the great joys in football is watching woeful scouse defending.
Yep, he looked immediately remorseful after the impact.
That's ridiculous.
He's still the best CB around and we're a better team with him than without. It's also fair to say that we've been poor defensively since the restart, and Van Dijk has to share in that responsibility. He's made some poor individual errors himself.
We were always going to drop off this year imo. It's not possible for any team to get 90+ points three years in a row in England. I still think we have a squad capable of hitting 80-90 points though, with or without Van Dijk. Whoever wins the league will do so with a tally somewhere in the mid 80's so I still think we'll be up there come the end of the season.
It's hard to call right now though because honestly, no one looks particularly impressive so far.
Feel very sad for VVD. Classy player and person whom has made the PL a much better league. Wish him the very best and hope he comes back strong.
On a practical level, it’s interesting and significant news for rival teams as Liverpool will certainly lose a lot of points because of his absence. And for United fans, hopefully it means Liverpool can level with us on 20 titles this season.
Who knows, if the team can get it’s act together, it may open the door for a serious title challenge from United.
On a practical level, it’s interesting and significant news for rival teams as Liverpool will certainly lose a lot of points because of his absence. And for United fans, hopefully it means Liverpool can level with us on 20 titles this season.
Who knows, if the team can get it’s act together, it may open the door for a serious title challenge from United.
I feel very sorry for Virgil. He is a a great example to all professional footballers. He is/was also Liverpool's best player? Probably! Huge loss. Really hope the wheels come off now and Liverpool regain their place as the laughing stock of the Premiership.
I genuinely think this is because defenders are asked to do so much more now. They're playing in higher lines, asked to carry the ball so much more. I struggle with this argument that players worldwide have all declined in ability. VVD is a marvel because he does all the new tasks and combines it with stability (people would argue not so much this season but the general pattern seems to be goals from the other side) and leadership.
I think he'd be thought of just as highly if not even higher 10 years ago.
Well it is due to Higuain not being a Dipper. If he was, then he would've been granted automatic Sainthood on signing and after that incident, Neuer would've been facing calls for attempted murder.
I feel exactly the same. VVD is essentially the one that allows them to play that ridiculous high line as he is the one that marshalls the line and he has excellent reading of the game and has good recovery pace. Not sure they can continue to look so solid without him there. This goes double as VVD has an aura of a world class CB which means others teams don't attack him as much as they should, similar to Terry and Ferdinand.
Agreed. VVD is a excellent player and perhaps the de facto NO.1 CB in the world, or top 3 at least. However, there are some mitigating factors:
1) He is playing in an incredibly poor generation of CB's.
2) He hasn't played long enough at the top level or shown this level for long enough. For me, the single most important aspect of greatness is longevity. VVD has been super for 3-4 years now but Rio, and Terry were great for 10-12 years. That is why I would always put those two above anyother other PL CB (as well as them being top class.)
Imo, VVD is currently in Vidic or Carvalho territory in that he is clearly a world class player but he still needs to do it a bit longer before he can start getting into the Goat discussions. Further, I would say Kompany is above him also, but he is a bit of a funny one to judge because of all his injuries. I have Kompany sort of in the Adams territory where they are probably above Vidic and Carvalho but under Rio and Terry.
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I haven't looked at that news a lot, but Teletekst describes it as a tackle that was much discussed and that no-one would have been surprised if Pickford had seen red (part of their one-page report on the match, so a lot of attention for Teletekst standards), and my Dutch newspaper calls it a horror tackle by the 'pumped up' goalie, which copied his 'attack' on Dele Alli two years ago. They also express their surprise at the ref and VAR ref letting this go unpunished. More sensationalist outlets probably would have had different things to say though.