Virgil Van Dijk was left red-faced during Liverpool training yesterday after horribly mistiming a volley,
As seen on LFCTV’s Inside Training video, Van Dijk was feeling confident as he stepped forwards for the shooting drill.
“I’m scoring now,” said the defender, after watching his teammates take their turns. To be fair to the big man, he did. Van Dijk blasted two perfect strikes past Marcelo Pitaluga. “Give me a good volley now,” requested the £220k-a-week star.
The crosser did his job, firing a perfect ball into Van Dijk’s right-foot. But the centre-back badly mistimed his kick, shinning it past the post, much to the delight of his Liverpool teammates who howled with laughter.
“I was just laughing because the delivery was so good!” said Van Dijk as he chuckled at his own misfortune. You’ll get em’ next time Virg.
Virgil shows off his shooting ability
Given the accuracy of Van Dijk’s first two strikes here, it’s amazing that he hasn’t scored more for Liverpool from outside the box.
The 31-year-old doesn’t have a bad record for The Reds, scoring 16 goals in 184 games. But most of them have been headers.
Van Dijk has never strode forward in a Daniel Agger-esque manner to plant on in the top corner from range. From this footage, and plenty of others that we’ve seen down the years, he’s more than capable.
Liverpool’s no.4 even used to take free-kick’s whilst playing for Celtic. His technique at striking from distance is obviously good, something we also see in his range of passing.
Perhaps it’s more a case of Liverpool not playing in a way that facilitates such goals regularly. Rarely will you see a Liverpool player score from distance these days.
Maybe it’s something they could do more of, though. Liverpool face a lot of low blocks over the course of a season and often struggle to break them down. Sometimes you just need a howitzer from distance to break the deadlock.
More often than not, that isn’t the way to go. But when you’ve got someone who can strike a ball like Van Dijk, it can be worth a try. Where would Manchester City, and indeed Liverpool, have been had Vincent Kompany not let rip against Leicester City in 2019…
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