The first full matchday has finished, with Groups A and B completing play on Monday, after hosts Qatar fell to opening day defeat to Ecuador on Sunday.

In Groups A and B, Liverpool have players in the England and Netherlands squad — though not all of them saw playing time.

Virgil Van Dijk captained his country to a resounding — if not always assured — 2-0 victory against Senegal in the early match on Monday.

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Despite the result and clean sheet, the Dutch side were far from perfect (indeed, an errant pass to Van Dijk nearly offered Senegal a wide open opportunity for Senegal to open up the scoring). In his post-match comments, Van Dijk emphasized the need for improvement ahead of their next match against Ecuador:

“We won but we also know that we can and must do better.

“Going forward we sometimes tried to force things, and we too often left ourselves exposed to Senegal’s counter-attacks.

hat is an area in which we will need to improve because it is an art that our next opponents, Ecuador, are very good at.

“But I am optimistic because I feel we are going to get better.”

Meanwhile, in Group B action the Reds’ players failed to make an impact, with both Trent Alexander-Arnold and Jordan Henderson finding themselves to be unused substitutes in England’s 6-2 rout of Iran.

Liverpool’s Ibrahima Konaté has an outside chance of playing time on Tuesday for France, though since he is not usually in the French starting XI it’s likely there will be no LFC involvement until Darwin Núñez’s Uruguay kick off on Thursday, followed by Alisson and Fabinho’s later match with Brazil.

Given the number of injuries we’ve seen in the opening matchday, it is perhaps not the worst outcome to have relatively few Liverpool players involved in the tournement.