Van Dijk Bullish on Season Prospects

Superstitious Liverpool fans will be intimately familiar with the inverse relationship between confident statements and subsequent results, typically in the form of surprising losses following a certain handsome but inconsistent defender’s insistence that the club is about to turn the corner and become a force to be reckoned with.

Well, food for panic, I guess, cos here comes another Reds centre-back with another assertive claim that Liverpool are definitely really good and are definitely going to do really well.

“With the players we have and we had already last season we can compete in every competition,” Virgil van Dijk told Sky Sports News on Friday.

“Hopefully we are going to do something special this year. I don’t like to look too far ahead - we just need to do the talking on the pitch and make sure we perform well. Everyone in the squad wants to win something. We know it is going to be a very hard season. (...)

“Hopefully, we will write our own history.”

To be fair to the world’s most expensive centre-back, he does well to temper his confidence with qualifiers, and he is absolutely correct; the 2018/19 iteration of Liverpool is bulging with quality in a way that hasn’t been seen for a decade. Whether they can deliver on that promise remains to be seen, but despite all circumstantial evbidence to the contrary, van Dijk is right to be optimistic.