The Lijnders Files: The assistant manager’s notes from day three of pre-season give some fascinating insight into what we can expect from the new campaign.

Pep Lijnders is back with another pre-season diary entry on the Liverpool club website, and once again, there’s plenty to unpack. The assistant manager covered a lot of ground, but he started with an update on the man a lot of fans have been most excited to see in training: Virgil van Dijk.

Lijnders picked out the returns of Van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joël Matip as the highlight of the camp so far, before going on to elaborate on what the colossal Dutchman brings to the Liverpool setup:

“Just now, I was walking off the pitch after this morning’s session thinking the quality and speed of passes were outstanding. Virgil found Milner one time with a ‘surprise’ pass through the centre in behind… we stopped the exercise there! Always ending on a high!”

While Van Dijk’s defensive attributes will obviously be a huge boost for Jürgen Klopp and his team this season, his incisive passing will be just as useful. In 2019/20, his last full season, the centre-back ranked in the 97th percentile for progressive passing distance among his positional peers in the top five European leagues. He was in the 99th percentile for long passes completed, managing almost 16 per game at a completion rate of 79.2%. If Liverpool’s attack — and particularly Sadio Mané — looked off the pace last season, it’s fair to say that at least some of that was down to the loss of such excellent service from Van Dijk.

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To give credit to Rhys Williams, he performed a fair impression of Van Dijk’s passing when called upon. The 20-year-old operated at a remarkable 84.2% long pass completion rate, completing a very respectable 11.59 per game. However, these passes were typically not progressive balls into the final third. While they got Liverpool up the pitch, they were not such a devastatingly effective offensive weapon as Van Dijk’s specialist distribution. The importance of the 30-year-old’s return cannot be overstated, a fact clearly not lost on Lijnders.

The assistant manager highlighted ‘options everywhere’ as the ‘password for offensive football’. Van Dijk’s defence-splitting passes clearly present a new option in Liverpool’s attack, but it also sounds like Lijnders is satisfied with the pressing work being done all over the pitch:

“At the moment, there are just options everywhere. This is, for me, the password for offensive football: options everywhere. They now just have to gain the confidence to feel that the last step is possible to win the ball back.”

This last sentence is telling. Liverpool’s pressing dropped off last season, an inevitable result of the pandemic-affected season. Still, it sounds as though progress is already well underway to work on setting up the traps once more. Lijnders and Klopp don’t just want to hem the opponent in; they want to nick the ball back from them: pressing is the best playmaker, after all. A revitalised press will be key in any potential title charge.