Since the beginning of last season, Virgil van Dijk has been almost invariably present for Liverpool. Jürgen Klopp’s injury places him in essentially new territory.

The electronic sign above the door to Liverpool’s injury treatment room has just flashed and a little bell has gone off. Now serving, number 21.

While that might imply that Kostas Tsimikas is suffering with a fitness issue, it is actually in reference to Virgil van Dijk. The number is not related to the shirt, but rather how many different players at the club have missed at least one match through injury in 2022/23.

The 32 absences collectively mustered by the 21 men will soon have cost Liverpool over 1,000 days of playing time, and the season is not yet at its halfway point. While not all absences are equal in terms of importance, Van Dijk is inevitably going to be a big miss for Jürgen Klopp, however long he ends up being out of action.

The Netherlands captain is the only outfield player who has started every match in league and Europe so far this term. He wasn’t quite so ever-present for the big games in 2021/22, but he was second only to Alisson Becker in terms of minutes played, and that on the back of missing almost all of the preceding campaign thanks to injury.

When you spell his last two-and-a-half years out like that, is it any wonder that his hamstring has given out? Only 24 players in world football have accumulated more minutes for club and country in 2022/23 (per Transfermarkt) and he was 17th in the standings last season. This means that the only two players with more minutes than Van Dijk since the start of 2021/22 are Milan Borjan and Dominik Livaković, both of whom are goalkeepers.

The Virgil van Dijk injury means 21 different Liverpool players will have missed at least one match in 2022/23, before reaching the half way point of the season. pic.twitter.com/sWw725cM1z

— Andrew Beasley (@BassTunedToRed) January 4, 2023

You can’t blame Klopp for wanting to select the world’s best centre-back as often as possible, but it has now come at a cost, for the next few weeks at least. His reliance upon Van Dijk means that he is left with a selection of fairly underheated central defensive combinations from which to select.

Eleven different pairings have been fielded since Ibrahima Konaté joined the club in 2021, but the top three have all featured Van Dijk, and he also made up half of one of the others. Of the remaining seven duos, three have played no more than 90 minutes together in this period. Klopp will have to make a call on which two centre-backs to select, but he has little by way of evidence upon which to base his decision. He is effectively in the dark.

By far the most used twosome has been Joël Matip and Konaté, with 615 minutes (46.1 per cent of the non Van Dijk time) since the start of last season. They are also ‘in possession of the shirts’ as they played the second half of the 3-1 loss at Brentford. That the Bees only had one shot in that period reflects positively, but the fact it led to a goal (for which Konaté was charged with a defensive error by Opta) does not bode quite so well.

The duo began their time together with a Champions League clean sheet, against Porto last season. However, they have conceded at least one goal in their six other appearances which lasted at least 45 minutes, and have let in one every 68 minutes on average overall.

More solid in that sense has been the seldom-tried combination of Konaté and Gomez, who have allowed just one goal in their 225 minutes together. The negative over their record (aside from the small sample size) is that their time came in the domestic cups last season. Granted, it was against Premier League opposition, but two games with Norwich and a half against Leicester is not the most testing.

The most surprising option remaining is the pairing of Gomez and Matip. It’s unusual in the sense that they have completed 90 minutes in central defence on just two occasions despite being at the club together for over six years. If any stat sums up the injury issues those two have suffered, this might be it.

Opta’s Michael Reid shared the with/without van Dijk statistics for Liverpool in the Premier League since his debut, and the difference is stark. How much is directly attributable to the Dutchman is up for debate, but the Reds’ win rate has been 17 per cent better when he has featured, with them collecting an extra 0.4 points-per-game in the process. Whom to replace him with is a deadly serious question with no easy answer for Klopp.

source: https://www.liverpool.com/