The Premier League’s best striker versus the Premier League’s best defender in a one-on-one battle watched by hundreds of thousands of individuals around the world?
On Sunday, the stakes in Liverpool’s match against Manchester City were much higher (it ended with the rating 1-1 for those of you who survive Mars), but those few seconds when Erling Haaland’s fight with Virgil van Dijk was explosive and exciting.
The two masters of their art had almost 3,500 square meters of Anfield’s hallowed turf to themselves.
Haaland rushed towards goal, dancing around the ball, making long passes and feints, desperately attempting to tempt a challenge from the game’s most unflappable centre-back. However, the Dutchman resisted, backing towards his own goal, and although he was ultimately unable to stop Haaland from slipping away and taking a shot, his keeper collected the ball with ease.
Fantastic defense or a little bit of luck? is breaking through this case, with the help of former Premier League strikers and centre-backs.
The Premier League Championship race in…
The ball breaks and also you have a look at a single defender, free to work on the pitch. What’s in your mind?
“Well, you wonder who you’re dealing with,” says Alan Shearer, the Premier League’s all-time leading goalscorer. If, for argument’s sake, you are playing a man who is not that fast, then the obvious thing you are going to do is knock it in and run it.”
“But he knows he won’t 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 throw Van Dijk off balance with a series of spinning dummies and drives. During a five-second panic, the Norwegian performs three body feints, two changes of direction and one devastating burst of pace to finally break free from the defender’s grip.
Haaland’s first move is to leap onto his right foot; the ball hits across the defender’s body, away from the spot Van Dijk is trying to point out him, but into his weaker leg.
Notice the shape of Van Dijk’s body – lying on his side and crouched low, capable of shift his weight when obligatory. This attitude based on former Ivory Coast centre-back Sol Bamba, he’s crucial in the battle.
Normally, if I used to be coaching a young defender, I would not tell him to show his back to the ball a lot. But Van Dijk never loses sight of where Haaland is – he sits low on his knees and positioned sideways, meaning he’s able to lunge in any direction, following his run.
Seconds later, Haaland modified tactics again.
“He tries to go left, right, left, right and then try to throw Virgil off balance to take control of the fight. But the defender doesn’t rush into the action, he just stands there all the time,” says Shearer.
It’s a move that Van Dijk became famous for during his commanding play at the heart of the Liverpool defense, during a similar break in 2019 during which he famously brought down Tottenham’s Moussa Sissoko on his left foot.
This is statistically supported by the “true” tackle rate, which includes tackles won and lost, as well as fouls committed while attempting a tackle, to measure how often a player tries to “get his foot on the ball”. Over the last five seasons, Van Dijk has averaged just 2.2 tackles per game, but most importantly, his success rate has increased to a very high 61%.
“It never dips and that’s the art,” Bamba says. “It’s easy to be tempted to get involved in a tackle, but if you dive, someone like Haaland will just push the ball past you and beat you.”
“If it were me, I probably would,” Bamba continues. “Neil Warnock used to inform us: ‘If the ball goes through, the striker doesn’t!'”
“But it takes real discipline to pull back like that. Van Dijk is smart, plays with his head and reads the game really well.
The relentless Haaland continues to spin and spin even though spaces are still closed.
The striker, who has already turned Van Dijk twice, sets his right foot as if he is going to sweep the ball with his left, but instead ducks to the opposite side and continues to play on his stronger foot.
Here we can see a subtle move in three frames as Haaland nudges the ball under Van Dijk’s back boot and heads towards the penalty area.
The resulting shot is poor, however, and Shearer attributes this to defensive pressure.
“Since he wasn’t having much fun turning left and right, Haaland thinks, ‘Okay, I’m going to run out of time in a minute, so I have to shoot quickly.’”
“In reality, he would have preferred to be three or four meters closer, so Van Dijk does his job and decides whether the striker takes the shot where he did.”
By staying near Haaland throughout the match, the defender even managed to lean over the striker as he was positioning himself to shoot.
Off-balance, forced down the wing and from tight angles, patient defensive play and constant deal with the ball minimized the likelihood of the world’s most lethal striker getting a transparent shot, which Opta estimated at 0.10 expected goals, which is largely what the average player suggests he would have a ten percent probability of scoring. Not a nasty result after an intimidating one-on-one match.
“It makes it very uncomfortable for him,” Bamba says. “He’s so close to him, within 40 yards, and he’s forcing him to take a difficult shot.”
“I wish I had this in my heyday, yeah!” Shearer chuckled and asked if he would enjoy that matchup in a giant game like this. You cannot deny the confidence of a person who has 260 Premier League goals to his name.
However, there will not be many players in world football who can reliably beat Van Dijk in a one-on-one match, as his latest titanic fight showed.
“In a situation like that, you would have believed in yourself, Haaland, but it just didn’t happen,” Shearer said, “and it was more a result of really, really good defending than poor attacking play.”
Let’s hope that we’ll give you the chance to repeat this result soon.
