No rush to replace Cou
I Nthe end, their patient persistence paid off. After a summer of claim and counter-claim, a high-profile transfer request and the selling club’s absolute insistence that their best player would not be leaving, come January, a deal was eventually done. Liverpool signed Virgil van Dijk.
They have also sold Philippe Coutinho to Barcelona, by the way, in case you spent your weekend in some rare, unsullied corner of this earth as yet untouched by Ethernet cables. And it is true, as many have not hesitated to point out, there are similarities in the way the two deals developed.
Such similarities are superficial though and if the Van Dijk deal tells us anything significant about the Coutinho saga, it is how we can expect Liverpool to go about finding a replacement.
After the five-goal annihilation at Manchester City in September, the 4-1 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur in October and the 3-3 capitulation against Sevilla in November, the same question was put to Jurgen Klopp over and over again: why, once a deal for Van Dijk looked unlikely, did he not move to sign a different defender? His answer was always that he was confident in the players he already had at his disposal. In other words, it was Van Dijk or nobody else.
Just over a month on from ‘Pizjuanbul’, Van Dijk’s move was confirmed and his arrival has inspired more confidence in Liverpool’s defence than there has been since Jamie Carragher’s retirement. Whether that confidence is built on solid foundations remains to be seen.
Van Dijk has played just once and he may well fail to live up to his status as the most-expensive defender of all time, but at least he, his manager, the club and the supporters know he is not a stop-gap.
If Klopp had moved for one of the other serviceable centre-backs he watched “500 million times” last summer, the player in question would have had to cope with being at best a second choice. His presence may even have been a barrier to another attempt at signing Van Dijk.
Instead, the Liverpool manager gambled that his first-choice target would become available again and that he would be worth the wait. The first part of that wage is now in. If the second part also pays off, Klopp’s patience will be vindicated.
It is much the same with Naby Keita, who appeared even less likely to join Liverpool as last summer progressed. RB Leipzig’s absolute intransigence over the availability of their highly-coveted midfielder appeared final and indeed, he ended the window as a Leipzig player.
Liverpool, though, did not look elsewhere and instead resolved that a deal would be done. The decision to pay a premium on top of Keita’s dormant release clause in order to secure him for the 2018-19 season said everything about the long-term approach to transfers that Klopp appears to have encouraged.
For him, the right player is the right player, whether he comes today, tomorrow, in six months’ or in 12 months’ time.
When will Thomas Lemar come, then? The Monaco winger is understood to be the leading candidate to fill Coutinho’s shoes at Anfield and many supporters, frustrated that the club failed to extend Barcelona’s year-and-a-halflong pursuit by another six months, would like to see part of the £142m fee from Barcelona reinvested immediately.
Yet if Monaco maintain their public “hands off” line in private negotiations, or attempt to extract more money from Liverpool given their newly-boosted bank balance, Lemar arriving on Merseyside this month seems unlikely.
Yes, Liverpool find themselves in exceptional circumstances after events of the past week and it would be foolish to overlook a deal for the right player at the right price at the right time with much left to play for in the remainder of the season.
A January signing is by no means off the cards, but if the Van Dijk and Keita deals tell us anything, it is that Liverpool are prepared to pursue their first-choice targets for as long as it takes to secure them. The next signing will not be rushed.
This could turn out to be Klopp’s third gamble in quick succession when it comes to key transfer targets, the third time he has waited patiently to sign the right player rather than just any player. It may only be this time next year before we know whether such gambles have paid off. – The Independent