Liverpool haven’t had an ideal start to the campaign and one pundit has placed the blame for this on the shoulders of Virgil van Dijk, with a barrage of bizarre claims.
Speaking on talkSPORT, Jason Cundy said: “There’s no doubting how good van Dijk was, but right now let’s call it as it is, van Dijk is an absolute shadow of the player he was.
“He’s getting overlooked because he’s happy to blame Trent [Alexander-Arnold] and Gomez and Tsimikas comes in. The mainstay right now is van Dijk and he’s nowhere near it.
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“What about the challenge on Mitrovic for the penalty against Fulham? Mitrovic turns him, that’s not van Dijk! He squares him up, turns him, penalty.
“Against Napoli, he lunges in and makes a challenge that he doesn’t have to make.”
Normally when you see the words ‘Jason Cundy’ and ‘talkSPORT’, you know that an outlandish claim is about to follow and this hasn’t changed in this case either.
Quite how our No.4 is blaming the likes of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Joe Gomez and Kostas Tsimikas isn’t clear but it’s obviously something that the former Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur defender thinks is true.
Saying that the 31-year-old is an ‘absolute shadow’ of the player he used to be is also very unfair, important to remind people that we’ve lost just two games this season.
Our form hasn’t been great and the captain of Holland could play better but that’s no reason to act as if he’s finished.
That is the nature of the beast though, when you play as well as our centre-half does, any drop in performance is blown out of the water and pundits like this 52-year-old hugely overreact.
Let’s hope he can get through the international break unscathed and return to help the Reds start a winning run of form.