Arne Slot has seemingly been wowed by one player in particular in his first few weeks as Liverpool head coach.
The 45-year-old inherited a top-quality squad from Jurgen Klopp over the summer, with colossal captain Virgil van Dijk among the cream of the crop.
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Dutch footballer Anco Jansen was a guest on ESPN show Voetbalpraat when he revealed that he recently spoke with the Reds boss over a game of padel, and in particular about the man in the number 4 shirt.
The 35-year-old shared an 11-word quote from Slot which sums up just what the Liverpool coach thinks of his centre-back leader (via FC Update): “This boy is not normal when it comes to playing football.”
Slot’s reported comment about Van Dijk could hardly contrast more from the defamatory remarks of De Telegraaf columnist Valentijn Driessen earlier this week labelling the Liverpool captain an ‘overblown narcissist’ with a ‘dubious’ reputation.
We think the words of an active head coach at one of the biggest clubs in world football, who’s working with the 33-year-old daily on the training ground, carry the greater weight out of those two hugely polarised opinions.
The comments from the boss will have been echoed by quite a number of Reds fans over the years, with our number 4 generally making defending look remarkably easy during his time at Anfield and emerging as a magnificent on-field leader, a reputation which has grown even further since he took the captaincy last year.
The great news for Slot is that he still has almost an entire season in which he’ll be working with Van Dijk – and hopefully he’ll have more than just that one campaign if the Liverpool hierarchy can tie him down to a contract extension before January, when as it stands other clubs will be free to approach him.