Virgil van Dijk

Van Dijk registers remarkably few tackles, a statistic regularly used against him by people who do not watch defending closely enough to understand what they are looking at. He steps across the striker half a second early, bending the intended run out towards the touchline, and the shot that was coming never actually happens. Tackling is what a defender falls back on once the positioning has already gone wrong.

The entire Liverpool structure depends on him remaining calm behind a high line that sits considerably further up the pitch than almost any other team in the division would dare to hold. Read it correctly and the forward is offside before he has taken a touch. Read it wrong and it becomes a one on one with the goalkeeper. He gets it right almost every time, which is precisely why Liverpool continue playing that way.