Why Virgil van Dijk is Brilliantly Boring

MLB star Francisco Lindor and Virgil van Dijk have little in common at face value. They play their sports the same way though.

It’s funny how things work out. How the lines of your life can cross before you even knew they existed.

Francisco Lindor, shortstop for the Cleveland Indians (now Guardians) baseball team, visited Liverpool FC in December 2018. It was a promotional crossover thing for New Balance. He met Jürgen Klopp and Sadio Mané, posed for the usual pictures, touched the sign in the tunnel. All the regular stuff.

Lindor also got to watch a game at Anfield. Not just any game, a Merseyside derby. And not just any Merseyside derby either.

He was at the Divock Origi derby.

With the Belgian scoring six goals against Everton, more than versus any other club for the Reds, a number of matches might feasibly fit that description. But there is only one clash with the Toffees befitting that name. Lindor was present for the 1-0 win which was secured thanks to a ludicrous goal in the 96th minute. It looks like he had a fine time.

About four months later, the 2019 Major League Baseball season began. It was the point at which I began following the sport seriously, having had a vague interest for years before (thanks to Moneyball, unsurprisingly). I picked New York Mets to be my team. Overshadowed by a behemoth in the same city and last title winners in the mid-1980s, they are MLB’s Everton.

Or they were. The team was taken over by Steve Cohen in 2020, a fan of the team who is estimated to be worth around $21bn. Probably more since that sentence was typed. Lindor was the first big acquisition of the new era, signing a 10-year, $341m contract. In football terms, it’s Robert Lewandowski’s current salary for a decade. Nice work if you can get it.

The Mets’ shortstop is flamboyant. He dyes his hair, has colourful cleats and custom made gloves. Lindor takes fashion very seriously. But he also aspires to be boring, with comments on the matter immediately bringing to my mind thoughts of Virgil van Dijk.

It was his shot that looped onto the Everton crossbar in 2018, enabling Origi to score after a comical misjudgment by Jordan Pickford. The lines of my sporting interests crossed in advance of me becoming a Mets fan, years before Lindor joined the team.

Ahead of a two-match series with the Phillies in London last summer, the Puerto Rican shortstop was asked to describe his game to someone who has never seen him play.

“My game is very consistently boring, which is something that I pride myself on. I will make good plays. I will hit my home runs. But I want to do it as consistently as possible… I don’t need to be making crazy plays. If it’s a ground ball up the middle and I get to it standing up, turn and throw, I love that. I pride myself on making my game as consistently boring as possible.” FRANCISCO LINDOR

It’s a description that screams van Dijk. Think back to the decade or so before he joined Liverpool. As age and injury put paid to the likes of Daniel Agger, Jamie Carragher and Sami Hyypiä, the heart of the Reds’ defence was manned by players such as Dejan Lovren and Martin Škrtel.

No matter the skills they had, consistently boring they were not. There was always an edge, a worry that a mishap was only moments away. Even someone like Joël Matip, a clear upgrade on some of his predecessors, was a little goofy. You don’t get a No Context tribute account on social media with delivering serious meme potential.

“Matip was seen by the whole scouting world as an error-ridden liability unfit for the Premier League,” wrote Ian Graham, Liverpool’s former Director of Research, in his recent book. “Our Possession Value model suggested [he] would significantly improve Liverpool’s performances,” he added, with history earning his maths homework an A grade.

There were no such doubts regarding van Dijk, from Graham, scouts or anyone. If there was boredom from corners of the Liverpool fanbase, it occurred in the summer of 2017 when the club opted to wait for their number one target rather than signing a centre-back for the sake of it, as many had demanded. Once he arrived, the Dutchman was beautifully boring, “making his plays” in Lindor’s parlance.

Virgil is the ultimate in no drama defenders. He memorably went from March 2018 to August of the following year without once being dribbled past by an opponent. It’s the sort of thing you wouldn’t particularly notice when watching his matches, but it became a thing fans and the media picked up upon.

The fact it has occurred four times since the start of December shows how even the greats can’t outrun age entirely. Even with the passing of time, van Dijk has still only been dribbled past a comparable number of times to other top centre-backs in England since the summer of 2017 despite playing at least double the minutes of most of them.

This is a by-product of the old Paolo Maldini principle. For a player to be dribbled past in a statistical sense, he needs to make a tackle. In his 66-game run of not seeing an opponent beat him with the ball, van Dijk only attempted 63 tackles. Doing his job properly with minimum fuss made them an irrelevance. Tackles are only required if a player makes a mistake, with the Dutchman committing very few in that era.

To post such numbers is remarkable enough. To do so in a team with flying full-backs and (mostly) one holding midfielder something else. At his peak, he could even handle a two-on-one opposition counter attack.

There’s nothing routine there. The Liverpool defender didn’t touch the ball nor engage his opponent. You would not know van Dijk was there from looking at the data. He blocked the pass and forced Moussa Sissoko onto his weaker foot, though, tilting the odds in his team’s favour.

Van Dijk makes football look boringly simple, just as Lindor frequently does with baseball. The Met has the slightly higher error rate across his major league career: 0.07 per game to Virgil’s 0.05 per 90 minutes in the league with the Reds. As a baseball season is 162 games, it’s hard to keep any negative statistic entirely under wraps.

As important as defending consistently is to both men, they have had their moments going the other way. There is nothing tiresome about their performances when the time is right.

Last year was the Mets’ best campaign since 2015. They won the National League Division Series, essentially the quarter-final for the World Series, if you’re not familiar. Mets’ decisive runs in that series came via a grand slam from Lindor at a packed home stadium (Citifield) against a despised rival. Perfect in every way.

Watch the clip. It’s only 28 seconds long if you’re not interested in baseball. Lindor delivers what the commentator calls ‘the biggest swing of the season for New York', yet he doesn’t celebrate at all. Boring! He did his job in that moment, but the job itself was not yet done.

And although 2023/24 was far from Liverpool’s best campaign in the last decade, you know who scored their winning goal in a cup final. It was in a packed stadium against a despised rival, just in case you’ve forgotten.

Both van Dijk and Lindor are among the best in their respective fields. They each have legitimate hopes of winning the biggest club prizes in their sports this year. Their teams will be able to rely on them delivering elite performance game after game, week after week, providing a foundation for them and their teammates to succeed.

Here’s to being bloody good, and being boring.