Liverpool’s £25m summer signing Gini Wijnaldum is loving life under his new manager Jurgen Klopp.
We acquired the Dutch dynamo after lengthy negotiations with relegated Newcastle back during our tour of America, and fans were intrigued to see what the talented but inconsistent midfielder had to offer. Wijnaldum made his competitive debut versus Arsenal at the Emirates last week and did very well, playing in a deeper, more central role than he mostly did with the Magpies.
In a 4-3-3 formation, Wijnaldum seems perfect on the left hand side of the middle trio, given licence to bomb forward and maximise his unbelievable physicality.
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Still only 25, Wijnaldum has promised fans there’s plenty more to come while raving about life under his new German boss.
“You experience it in a meeting, how he talks, the way he coaches from the sidelines – with a lot of passion,” he told the latest edition of LFCWORLD.
“You can see that he believes in the team and he wants to get the team to a higher level. I think he’s the right man to achieve things with the club and the team that we have right now.
“How he talks with players gives you belief and confidence, and that’s what we need. He forces us to use our quality and that’s good.
“He gives us the confidence not to be scared to make mistakes and when he talks about the team or the players he says that we have to use our quality because he knows we can. That gives you a good feeling.
“If you see how he coaches, how he looks at the game, it’s different to all the other coaches I had. I’ve seen a lot, but none like him.”
“I want to win titles. Liverpool is a club with a beautiful history, but we have to make new history and we can do it with titles and winning games,” he added.
“That’s what I want to do here. We have a good team, really talented, and if we work as a team I think we can achieve a lot of things.
“A club like Liverpool deserves it. The players before us already wrote history and now it’s on us to write more.
“I think we can achieve a lot of things with the team because the team is very talented. We have to believe that we can do something, that we can win titles.
“And if we can do that I’m sure it will be a big opportunity for us to win things – that’s what I want to achieve with the team.
“Liverpool is a big club and you have to do everything to write history with them, that’s what we have to do this season. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.”
There’s a chance the former PSV and Feyenoord man could play on the right wing on Saturday, in Sadio Mane’s likely absence through injury.
Wijnaldum can play practically anywhere in midfield, so when injuries arise, expect him to be able to move – hopefully seamlessly – around the team.