One former Everton manager has aimed a tasteless dig at Liverpool in a public evisceration of a current Reds player.
Netherlands boss Ronald Koeman laid into the Oranje’s national team captain Virgil van Dijk during an appearance on Dutch broadcaster NOS.
The 60-year-old snarled (via Voetbal Primeur): “[Van Dijk] will have to be better. We are well endowed with central defenders.
“I’ve always said to Virgil: you have to assume that the player next to you is making a mistake. Then you have to look: am I right? Am I assessing the situation correctly? And sometimes he just has to play much harder and shorter, but then he keeps his position too much. I also discuss that with Virgil.
“Virgil was injured, of course. A knee injury, a muscle injury, then played a World Cup in November… but I think his lesser form also has to do with the team he plays in.”
No Liverpool supporter will claim that this season has been even a satisfactory one for the Reds, but Koeman’s barb about Van Dijk’s ‘lesser form’ being down to his club’s drop-off from 2021/22 still comes across as sour and needless.
It also lacks class from the Netherlands boss to publicly criticise his captain in such a manner, when such words could easily be exchanged in a private setting. It’s one thing to demand better from a player; it’s another to seek attention by giving them a defamatory dressing-down in public.
It’s not as if the 60-year-old has enjoyed a glittering coaching career of late, either. He was sacked by Everton in 2017 when they occupied a place in the relegation zone (BBC Sport) and walked out of his national team post when the Barcelona job came up in 2020.
He lasted little more than a year at Camp Nou (BBC Sport) before commencing a second spell in charge of his country, who’ve made an inauspicious start to their Euro 2024 qualifying campaign, being hammered 4-0 by France and then labouring to victory over Gibraltar.
Even if the current season hasn’t been the best of Van Dijk’s career – something the 31-year-old would acknowledge himself – he still seems hard done by to be called out by Koeman so scathingly, and the swipe at Liverpool doesn’t cover the Oranje boss in glory either.