Van Dijk moment ‘speaks volumes’ for Liverpool as Premier League faces ‘backlash’ | OneFootball

There are all manner of big stories knocking around in football land this morning, up to and including major international news forcing its way in.

Yet in some corners of the football media the biggest stories to be found are some tish-and-fipsy social media ‘backlash’ and a long-retired footballer having some drinks.

Sometimes it’s hard to shake the notion that to a large extent we deserve to be on this execrable timeline.

Kiss and tell

You’ll be delighted to learn that volumes have been spoken. This time by Virgil van Dijk during Liverpool’s 5-2 win over West Ham.

You, a fool, might think that the Van Dijk moment that spoke volumes might be the fact he scored his third goal in six Premier League games, or the fact he racked up yet another 90 minutes in a season where the 34-year-old’s workload is almost unmatched by any other player in the division.

The Daily Mirror’s Andy Dunn, an intellectual, knows better.

Yes, we all definitely needed to see Van Dijk kiss the Liverpool badge to be reassured he has some fondness for the club where he became the best defender in the world and won the sport’s biggest trophies.

But what’s this about him seeming ‘too cool’ to be a badge-kisser? We’re not even really sure what that means. Is badge-kissing…uncool? Mediawatch, to its shame, realises we’ve never given that vital question a moment’s thought either way. Now we can think of little else.

What we do know, though, is that if it is uncool, Van Dijk is not ‘too cool’ to do it. It’s not even the first time he’s kissed the badge after scoring a Premier League goal against West Ham at Anfield in the last 12 months.

Dunn’s Reach stablemates Liverpool.com had that story last April. Back then, of course, it didn’t just speak volumes but was a ‘contract hint’.

And as if by magic, just four days later, that contract extension was confirmed. All because he was willing to lose cool points by kissing the badge.

World in motion

Sometimes we find it helps to allow yourself one small chuckle at the bad things that happen.

One such instance arrives thanks to the Mirror as they address the fact that Iran and by extension several other countries really might this week decide to withdraw from the World Cup due to it being hosted in the USA, whose warmongering leader was recently given a peace prize by the very people who organise the World Cup.

We really have been cursed to live upon the very worst timeline.

It’s obviously very bad. And what the Mirror have done is write a perfectly safe and entirely valid listicle detailing previous examples of countries withdrawing from World Cups for whatever reason.

What they’ve then done is put it under this headline.

The situation is certainly bad, chaps, but we don’t think it’s quite at the stage suggested by the (we assume deliberate) ambiguity contained within.

X rated

Mediawatch has long since given up trying to understand news values in the year of someone’s lord 2026, but there are still sometimes choices and decisions that we simply cannot get our old-man-yelling-at-clouds head around.

We can think of many justifiable lead football stories this morning. The title race. Manchester United’s continued resurgence under Michael Carrick. Tottenham’s relegation fears and Igor Tudor’s post-match meltdown at Fulham.

And if you want to look beyond the bagatelle of this daft little game itself, yes, the fact the World Cup could absolutely be plunged into pure chaos by mounting geopolitical tensions.

These all feel valid.

But the top football story this morning according to that bastion of reason and good old-fashioned common sense (not that common these days, though, is it guys, what with all the wokes and snowflakes, eh?!) the Daily Express?

The Premier League’s X-formerly-Twitter account deleting a banter post that mildly took a small amount of piss out of Guglielmo Vicario.

We can understand that Spurs fans are feeling rather fragile at this time and didn’t really much care for seeing their goalkeeper mocked by an official X account. But ‘blasted’? Come on now.

By the intro, it has become a ‘backlash’ to a video that ‘openly ridicules’ Vicario.

It wasn’t a very good tweet. It probably isn’t a good idea for the official Premier League account to be quite so Paddy Power.

But when did we all so entirely lose the run of ourselves that this could be seen as the biggest story in all of football on a Monday morning when you’ve got every available flavour of actual football story you could wish to see?

Booze clues

Of course, the actual biggest story in football is the news that former footballer Wayne Rooney had some drinks and spoke to some women.

‘WAZZ ON THE RAZZ’ chortle The Sun before gleefully telling us:

Obviously, ‘mystery women’ is a classic piece of nudge, nudge tabloidese to hint at something underhand or naughty when they can’t actually say it out loud; it literally just means women The Sun have been unable or unarsed to identify. The same can be said for noting, via the ever-convenient testimony of an eye-witness, that ‘Coleen was nowhere to be seen’.

But the story is not entirely without its merits. Who, for instance, can honestly say they could have gone about their daily business without knowing that: