Anfield Until The End 17/18

Virgil van Dijk: Defender

I, personally, was absolutely surprised to find this news out. I was coming home from a trip to Chicago (just a drive, we live fairly close to the Windy City) and just wanted to see if anything was going on. And . . . I don't even want to explain the noise I made when I saw this. He's a winter transfer, which usually turn out to be alright (Coutinho, Grujic, Sturridge anyone??) but also means we're waiting until the 1st of January for things to be official. Then, he'll be ours and we'll get him in Melwood, doing that ominous standing into the sunset as if he just blew up some stuff pose that new players are doing now.

Van Dijk stands at a tall 6'4, only an inch shorter than our tallest, Joel Matip. I will continue to talk about this until the end of time but our aerial defense is shaky at best, with a lot of failed headers or the players in general being to short to get to the ball (for example, Moreno and I don't think Robertson is that much taller than him). Although added height doesn't instantly mean that this part of the defense will be fixed and we'll never concede another goal for as long as we live, it certainly helps things a lot. 

But to really get to it . . . this man is awesome. He protects the keeper and is generally the last man/only one reacting to the ball being crossed/passed in in many of the situations shown in the video. And, of course, videos like these are meant to showcase all the good things that the player can do (and as I said, this video does that very well), but there is a grain of salt to take from this. He got a season ending injury around the end of last season and hasn't properly trained since then, thanks to this summer's hijinks and the overall manager changes going on as well. So I'm not saying that he's horrible now because Joe Gomes also went through something like that and came back and is doing great right now. I'm just saying that if Klopp gives him time off for a while to just join up with the squad (a la the Ox), this may be one of those reasons.

He's 26 right now and he's been playing in the PL for  a while now, meaning that he'll already understand how everyone plays including us, but once again, as shown by Ox, Klopp doesn't really care about this and just wants to make sure that the incoming players gel with others and properly understand the high press that we do or else he'll just be thrown in and that'll be a crappy situation overall. This isn't saying that he isn't already used to a high press as he's played in those styles before with other teams and possibly in country (not really sure how the Netherlands play), but Klavan has described our style in the summer as something totally different than what he's seen before. And he's played in the Bundesliga, where high pressing is seen a lot. I'll say that I'm excited to see what he does, but a transition period where he isn't judged is also required. 

At $100m or 75 million pounds (new laptop also will not allow me to put in the pounds symbol so bear with me in this transition period too), he's the most expensive defender out there. David Luiz or John Stones jokes are now obsolete (well, maybe not the Stones ones, he's not all that just yet) as they're not the big money out there anymore. With this, we'll be expecting a lot of big performances from him but I'm sure you've already read that Klopp wants us to simply forget about the price tag, be happy he's ours and a Red. Great words to live by really. He's done a lot of good work that shouldn't be forgotten with his former clubs, the only reason we're here right now. Van Dijk is a top of the market defender, someone we've needed for a while now and have finally gotten. Excellent business by LFC to sort out a spot that's been in need for a while now. 

Talk about Virgil in the comments down below!