Dissecting Haaland vs Van Dijk: When the league’s best striker took on his best defender
The best striker in the Premier League versus the best defender in the Premier League in a one-on-one showdown with millions of people around the world?
There were much bigger things at stake between Liverpool and Manchester City 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 was explosive and exciting.
Two masters of their art had almost 3,500 square meters of hallowed Anfield grass to themselves.
Haaland thundered towards goal, dancing around the ball with lengthy step-overs and feints, desperate to challenge the game’s most unflappable centre-back. But the Dutchman resisted and returned to his own goal, and although he ultimately couldn’t stop Haaland from slipping away and taking the shot, it was an effort that was easily collected by his goalkeeper.
Fantastic defending, or a bit of luck? The Athletics breaks it down, with the help of former Premier League strikers and centre-backs.
The race for the Premier League title continues The Athletics…
So the ball breaks and you’re staring at a single defender, with the freedom of the pitch to work with. What’s going through your mind?
“Well, you weigh up who you’re up against,” says Alan Shearer, the Premier League’s all-time leading scorer The Athletics. “For the sake of argument, if you’re facing someone who you know isn’t that fast, the obvious thing you’re going to do is knock him down and get rid of him.”
“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 unnerve Van Dijk, throwing him off balance with a series of squirming dummies and drifts. During a five-second rush, the Norwegian performs three body feints, two changes of direction and one devastating burst of speed to ultimately break free from his defender’s grasp.
Haaland’s first move is to shoot on his right foot; this is over the defender’s body and away from where Van Dijk is trying to show him, but on his weaker foot.
Note Van Dijk’s body shape: sideways and low crouched, able to shift his body weight if necessary. That position, according to former Ivory Coast central defender Sol Bamba, crucial for the fight.
“If I was coaching a young defender, I wouldn’t normally tell them to turn their back on the ball. But Van Dijk never loses sight of where Haaland is; he sits low on his knees and to the side, meaning he’s willing to jump in any direction to track his run.
A few seconds later, Haaland has tacked again.
“What he’s trying to do is go left, go right, go left, go right and then try to get Virgil off balance to gain control of the game. But the defender doesn’t dive in, he stays there all the way,” says Shearer.
It’s a move Van Dijk has become known for during his imperious spell at the heart of Liverpool’s defence, famously deflecting Tottenham’s Moussa Sissoko onto his left foot during a similar break in 2019.
Statistically, this is reflected in the ‘real’ tackles metric, which combines tackles won and lost, as well as fouls committed during a tackle, to measure how often a player tries to ‘put a foot in the ball’. Over the past five seasons, Van Dijk has averaged just 2.2 tackle attempts per game, but crucially his success rate is at a very high 61 percent.
“He never dives in and that’s an art,” says Bamba. “It’s so easy to be tempted to go into the tackle, but if you dive in, someone like Haaland will just push the ball past you and beat you.”
“If it was me I probably would have agreed,” Bamba continues, “Neil Warnock always said to us, ‘If the ball passes, 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 very well.”
The ruthless Haaland keeps turning and turning even as the spaces remain closed.
Having already turned Van Dijk twice, the striker plants his right foot as if he is about to drag the ball across with his left, but instead dives to the other side and continues on his stronger foot.
Here we can see the subtle movement in three frames, as Haaland pushes the ball under Van Dijk’s trailing boot and charges towards the penalty area.
However, the resulting shot is weak, and Shearer puts that down to defensive pressure.
“Because he wasn’t having much fun going left and right, Haaland thinks, ‘Okay, I’m out of time in a minute, so I have to get my shot away quite quickly.’
“In reality he would have preferred to be about three meters closer, so that’s part of Van Dijk doing his job and pushing the attacker to take the shot where he did.”
The defender has stayed close to Haaland throughout, even managing to lean into the striker just as he sets up his shot.
Off balance, forced wide and with his angles reduced, patient defensive play and constant attention to the ball have minimized the chances of the world’s most lethal striker getting a clean shot away, an effort rated by Opta at 0.10 expected goals, which essentially suggests an average player would have a 10 percent chance of scoring. Not a bad outcome from an intimidating one-on-one.
“He makes it so uncomfortable for him,” says Bamba, “He’s so close to him, forty yards, forcing him into a difficult shot.”
“I would have wanted it in my heyday, yes!” Shearer chuckled and asked if he would have enjoyed such a showdown in a huge game like this. You can’t begrudge the confidence of a man with 260 goals in the Premier League.
But there aren’t many players in world football who can reliably beat Van Dijk in a one-on-one, as his last titanic battle showed.
“He would have believed in himself in that situation, Haaland, but it just didn’t happen,” Shearer said, “and that was more because of very, very good defending than bad attacking play.”
Let’s hope we get another repeat soon.
(Top photo: Premier League)