Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp hopes to discover his own Sergio Ramos and copy the weapons his predecessor Brendan Rodgers used during the 2013/14 season.
On Wednesday, Liverpool defender Virgil van Dijk marked his first game as the club’s official captain with a goal in a 4-3 pre-season loss to Bayern Munich.
Van Dijk was able to drive home from Andy Robertson’s corner after making an unmarked run just half an hour before the game at the Singapore National Stadium.
“We work on set situations every day and in my opinion I should be more careful sometimes, so that’s what I’m doing and today I’m free and I have could score,” the Dutchman told Liverpool’s official website afterwards. .
The stats show that in Van Dijk’s five-and-a-half years with Liverpool (and rememberingly one of them almost left because of an ACL injury), Van Dijk has scored 16 Premier League goals after. 147 executions and a xG of 12.1. That means he has scored about 4 more goals than you would have guessed based on the quality of the chances he got, the majority of which were headers in free kick situations. .
Last season, only three centre-backs in the league surpassed his total of 30 shots – Everton’s James Tarkowski and Arsenal’s Gabriel both tied at 32, then Newcastle’s Fabian Schär leading the way with 56.
Additionally, only five of his peers – Gabriel (5.1), Schar (4.9), Ben Mee and Ethan Pinnock of Brentford (3.2, 3.0) and Tarkowski (3.1) – have recorded xGs higher than 2.6 of the Dutch.
Van Dijk has since established himself as one of the biggest fixed threats in the premier league.
A three-goal doesn’t sound spectacular in this context, but that hasn’t necessarily been an issue so far. Indeed, Liverpool scored more goals from dead-ball situations (17) than any other side in the Premier League last season, so they are not an untapped weapon.
Van Dijk has generally tried his luck quite well during his Anfield career, as the numbers suggest, but the bottom line here is that he believes he can be more clinical.
You can see why. The 32-year-old knows that he is one of the most prolific aerialists in the league, with the fourth-highest success rate on headers last season at 74.2% (admittedly, the Defensive disputes are different from scoring opportunities), and so is he. know that he is on a team that has some of the best corner and corner takers. Liverpool full-backs Trent Alexander-Arnold (34, eighth) and Robertson (27, 16th) were both ranked in the top 20 in the league for dead passes that led to shot attempts last season. .
The top scorer in the Reds’ recent history is Martin Škrtel, who joined the club in 2008 and left at the end of Jürgen Klopp’s first season. In the 2013/14 season, when Liverpool lost to Manchester City by just two points in the Premier League title, Škrtel scored seven goals for Brendan Rodgers.
If we look at Europe more generally, Real Madrid legend Sergio Ramos is the most outstanding central defender of all time, with an impressive 101 goals in his career with Los Blancos. His best years in front of goal were 2019/20, when he scored 11 goals in La Liga, and 2016/17, when he scored seven goals without resorting to penalties.
That must be the kind of standard Van Dijk aspires to achieve as the Reds seek to extract the good returns that can make all the difference at the highest level, which they know better than most.
It is known that the captain has been working hard to make attacking headers on the training ground, and Klopp is hoping to reap the rewards next season.
