virgil-van-dijk - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
The system doesn’t work with this Virgil van Dijk
This isn’t my beautiful house....
The arms race between Manchester City and Liverpool has gone nuclear
The narrative between Liverpool and Manchester City has always been something like the A’s and Yankees from the early 2000s. The two powers of a league operating on completely different planes and through wildly different methods. The Big Bad with all the money that can buy their way out of anything...
Icarus can kiss my ass
Perhaps there’s no bigger showcase of Lucy yanking the football away than Liverpool chasing The Quadruple. Because as it got closer, it only became harder and only felt further away. Which sounds stupid, because no team has gotten closer. But fatigue was clear for the last few weeks, and the more ma...
Real Madrid have more than just black magic against Liverpool
While four years is a long time in soccer, and teams can greatly transform a couple times in that timespan, Real Madrid and Liverpool look a lot like they did four years ago. Liverpool are still anchored by Virgil van Dijk, Trent Alexander-Arnold, and Andrew Robertson in defense and Sadio Mane and M...
It comes down to minute levels of control
The Premier League title chase took a massive turn this weekend. Liverpool dropped points at home to Tottenham, drawing 1-1 on Saturday afternoon. Buoyed by watching that, and in the wake of trying to recover from their Champions League collapse, Manchester City rubbed Newcastle’s ass in the moonshi...
Lost in Liverpool’s pursuit of a quad is Man City’s potential treble
With Tiger Woods falling out of contention and Sunday at Augusta turning into a sleepy 3-year-old crashing off of sugar, wake yourself up by flipping on probably the biggest game of the English Premier League season. Man City sits atop the table but only barely. Liverpool, still chasing a potential ...
We all know Liverpool can’t win the Quadruple, but what my book presupposes…
To say winning the Quadruple–the League Cup, the FA Cup, the Champions League, and the Premier League–is a dream isn’t accurate. No fan ever really thinks of it before a season starts, or really before even February. It’s beyond fantasy. It’s not something you’d ever give the time of day. Perhaps En...
For one evening, Mohammed Salisu was Gandalf
Usually, when one player dominates a game, bending it to his will, you think of hat tricks and thunder-bastard goals and everything offensive. After all, soccer is judged on who scores and who doesn’t. And that goes for pretty much every sport....
Aston Villa shows ambition by signing Philippe Coutinho, but for what exactly?
It may not be possible to feel sorry for someone who got to rake in tens of millions of dollars to live in Barcelona (with a brief sojourn to Munich) and not have to do much. And certainly Liverpool supporters won’t have any sympathy for Philippe Coutinho given the way he exited Anfield for the Nou ...
Divock Origi, the club legend who never plays
Every fandom has their cult heroes who seemingly drop in out of the sky and provide a lifelong memory. Phillies fans have Matt Stairs. Bulls fans have Steve Kerr, to an extent (Kerr was a fine player but he does seem an odd choice from the gods to hit a title-clinching shot, no? Then again, he did i...
Harry Kane and Spurs are learning what happens when you stay together for the kids
If there was ever going to a point where Tottenham could have turned their season around, a moment to use as a springboard, it was yesterday. They were at home, facing one team that might be in a bigger crisis than they are, Manchester United. For at least a little while, their fans sensed the same,...
Euro 2021: Memphis Depay gets to try again
To make it to the very top levels of any sport as an athlete, it must take an unfathomable reservoir of self-belief. With all the obstacles, the sheer amount of work, and all the days where the dream must seem as close as one of Saturn’s moons, one would have to be able to call on a never-ending sup...