I Look Forward To Playing With Jacquet And Ronald Araujo – Van Dijk

Liverpool captain Virgil van Dijk has praised new defenders Jeremy Jacquet and Ronald Araujo following their impressive pre-season debuts against Como. He recently had his say while speaking to the press, and fans have been reacting.

Admitting that it will take time to forge a solid partnership with his new teammates, VVD revealed that he is very optimistic ahead of LFC’s Premier League opener against Newcastle.

Van Dijk concluded by stressing the importance of gaining vital match experience together.

His words, “I think [Jacquet] did well, same as Ronald.

It’s a start, a good start so hopefully he can crack on. [You build relationships] by playing games. I won’t say it’s the only way, but games are totally different than training.

Jeremy’s English is, I would say, a bit better than Ronald’s but at the end of the day we are all pretty good footballers. We can see and smell some moments on how to defend certain situations.

But it’s pretty clear that you need to form a connection together and that takes a bit of time. In my opinion that’s absolutely normal but hopefully we can get that going as quickly as possible.

Like I said, I think [Jacquet] did well. I think he came out of it a bit tired, but it’s absolutely normal when you’re playing your first 45 minutes after such a long time. Now it’s down to him to recover.

We’ll be back on the pitch tomorrow morning and then we’re working towards Newcastle. St James’ Park will always be a tough one.

What I see is that no team in world football can play full intensity for 90 minutes.

Obviously at a certain point, you’re gonna have some moments where players – or we all – get to a position where we’re gonna be a bit tired. Then it’s down to us to make sure that we are compact and find the right moment to press again. I think we did that much better than we did the last game.

Obviously everyone’s eager to go and to press and keep their intensity up but it’s a team game and we need everyone together in order to be able to do that. That goes in phases through the game.”