The best striker in the Premier League against the best defender in the Premier League in a one-on-one matchup with millions of people watching around the world?
Liverpool vs Manchester City had much bigger things at stake on Sunday (it ended 1-1 for those of you who live on Mars), but those few seconds in which Erling Haaland took on Virgil van Dijk and it was explosive and exciting.
Two masters of their art had almost 3,500 square meters of sacred turf at Anfield to themselves.
Haaland raced towards goal, dancing around the ball with long strides and feints, desperate to tempt a challenge from the game’s most unflappable centre-half. But the Dutchman held on, backing towards his own goal, and although he ultimately couldn’t stop Haaland from breaking away and launching the shot, it was an effort comfortably collected by his goalkeeper.
Fantastic defense or a bit of luck? The Athletic breaks it down, with the help of former Premier League forwards and centre-backs.
Premier League title race continues The Athletic…
Then, the ball breaks and you’re looking at a single defender, with the freedom of the field to work with. What is going on in your head?
“Well, you’re weighing up who you’re up against,” says Premier League all-time leading goalscorer Alan Shearer. The Atlético. “If, for the sake of argument, you’re up against a guy who you know isn’t that fast, then the obvious thing you’re going to do is knock him down and run.”
“But he knows he’s not going to do that to Virgil, because the Liverpool defender is one of the few people who can keep up with Haaland.” — Even running backwards.”
The solution is to unsettle Van Dijk, to unbalance him with a series of movements and spinning doll movements. During a five-second stampede, the Norwegian launches three body feints, two changes of direction and a devastating acceleration to finally escape the reach of his defender.
Haaland’s first move is to lunge on his right foot; this is across the defender’s body and away from where Van Dijk tries to show him, but on his weaker foot.
Note Van Dijk’s body shape: sideways and crouched, able to shift his body weight if necessary. That posture, According to former Ivory Coast centre-back Sol Bamba, it is crucial to the battle.
“Normally, if I was coaching a young defender, I wouldn’t tell him to turn his back on the ball so much. But Van Dijk never loses sight of where Haaland is: he is on his knees and on his side, which means he is prepared to jump in any direction to continue his run.”
Seconds later, Haaland changed course again.
“What he’s trying to do is go left, go right, go left, go right and then try to unbalance Virgil to take control of the duel. But the defender doesn’t dive, instead he stays on his feet the entire time,” says Shearer.
It’s a move Van Dijk has become famous for during his imperious spell at the heart of Liverpool’s defence, famous for protecting Tottenham’s Moussa Sissoko with his left foot during a similar break in 2019.
Statistically, that’s shown by the “true” tackles metric, which combines tackles won and lost, as well as fouls committed while attempting a tackle, to measure how often a player looks to “get a foot in.” Over the past five seasons, Van Dijk has averaged just 2.2 tackle attempts per game, but more importantly, his success rate has increased to a sky-high 61 percent.
“It never submerges and that’s an art,” Bamba says. “It’s very easy to be tempted to attack, but if you go for it, someone like Haaland will just push the ball past you and beat you.”
“If it were me, I probably would have committed it,” Bamba continues. “Neil Warnock used to tell us: ‘If the ball goes through, the striker doesn’t!’”
“But it takes real discipline to back off like that. “Van Dijk is intelligent, he plays with his head and reads the game very well.”
The relentless Haaland continues to go round and round even as the gaps continue to close.
After turning Van Dijk around twice, the striker plants his right foot as if he were about to drag the ball with his left, but instead crouches to the opposite side and continues with his stronger foot.
Here we can see the subtle movement in three frames, as Haaland pushes the ball under Van Dijk’s boot and advances towards the penalty area.
The resulting shot, however, is weak and Shearer attributes this to defensive pressure.
“Having not really liked going from left to right, Haaland thinks, ‘Well, I’ll run out of time in a minute, so I have to shoot pretty quickly.'”
“Actually, I would have preferred to be another three or four meters closer, so that’s part of Van Dijk doing his job and deciding the striker to take the shot where he did.”
After staying close to Haaland throughout, the defender even manages to lean towards the forward just as he prepares his shot.
Off-balance, forced wide and with his tight angles, patient defensive play and constant attention to the ball have minimized the chance of the world’s most lethal striker getting a clean shot from distance, an effort valued at 0.10 expected goals by Opta , which essentially suggests an average player would have a 10 percent chance of scoring. Not a bad result of an intimidating one-on-one.
“It’s very uncomfortable for him,” says Bamba, “it’s so close to him for 40 meters and it forces him to take a difficult shot.”
“I would have liked it in my heyday, yes!” Shearer chuckled and asked if he would have enjoyed a matchup like that in a big game like this. You can’t believe the confidence of a man with 260 Premier League goals.
But there aren’t many players in world football who can reliably beat Van Dijk one-on-one, as their latest titanic fight demonstrated.
“He would have believed in himself in that situation, Haaland, but it just didn’t happen,” Shearer said, “and that was more due to very, very good defense than bad attacking play.”
Let’s hope it happens again soon.
(Photo above: Premier League)
