There’s more than one way to play ball
LOOK he’s exceptional. We know he’s exceptional. In all likelihood yes he’s, in the modern parlance, the GOAT: the greatest of all time. The man is a wizard, doing things with the ball that the rest of us – and that includes the majority of his professional colleagues – can’t even conceive of let alone execute.
He regularly leaves us slack-jawed and disbelieving the evidence of our own eyes. He leaves us spit-taking and double-taking on a weekly basis. The stats are incredible for goals scored and for goals assisted.
Now that Ronaldo is beginning to drop off, he’s undisputed as the greatest attacking player in the world. And, yet, for all that, acknowledging all that, there’s something about Lionel Messi’s coronation this week as the Ballon d’Or recipient for 2019 that doesn’t sit right with us.
Obviously it’s not that he’s unworthy of the accolade more so it’s who he took the award ahead of this time around: Virgil van Dijk. To our money van Dijk was the most influential player in the world last year.
The transformation of Liverpool’s fortunes since his arrival has been striking. He’s calm and authoritative. He’s bone-crunchingly effective and he’s more stylish than Paris fashion week. As centre-halves go he’s a Rolls-Royce, already one of the greats and probably the best we’ve seen since Fabio Cannavaro.
Even so we’ve seen a depressing amount of sentiment expressed online that anybody suggesting van Dijk ought to have won the award is a deluded, blinkered Liverpool fan. To that we can say only this: there’s more than one way of playing football. Not everybody has to be a goal-scorer, not every player has to be creative (and it’s not like van Dijk doesn’t have those qualities too by the way). A centre-half is as worthy of the Ballon d’Or as a centre-forward. Defence is as important as offence.
Maybe it’s a factor of the modern world that a lot of people seem to set higher store by attacking play. A goal is more likely to be packaged into a clip of a few seconds for distribution on social media than a tackle or a calm interception. Van Dijk might not be the GOAT, but he is great and this year he was out on his own. The award should have been his.