I don’t think anyone can VVD has been perfect - there have been big mistakes. But overall, he’s been a great signing and has almost single handedly improved our defence.
We should also factor in he came back from a long term injury last season (at Soton) and was pretty rusty when he joined us.
Question: Are we going to be in this final without VVD?
No , what I am saying is, if we failed to buy him January transfer window are we going to be in this final?Why? Has he picked up an injury?
No , what I am saying is, if we failed to buy him January transfer window are we going to be in this final?
I remember seeing the stats for our defense pre and post signing VVD, but can't remember where. Short version, we concede less with him and win more. Simple enough. And yeah, back from injury, very little game time, no preseason with us and he's still shored up our defense massively. Can't wait to see him next season with a settled back 5 again (maybe a new CB *fingers crossed*) but from the start. I don't feel half as worried every defensive set pieces any more!
Aside from his actual defending, I think he has helped us as a team going forward. Calm on the ball, picks a pass.
Dare I say we actually have a reasonable defense now?
Our defence has improved significantly since Lovern is not playing and we have a new Goalkeeper
To be fair to Karius and even Lovren, our defence has improved since Jan this year - when VVD came.
Our team as a whole defends really well - we don’t allow teams to run right through us and we don’t concede many shots.
The issue is that we conceded far too many individual errors. And most of the errors led to great scoring opportunities.
By removing Moreno with Robertson, Migs with Karius (marginal improvement), VVD to break the Lovren - Matip pairing, and Trent developing further. We cut out more errors.
This season, we’ve gone one step further. Gomez has been a revelation and so too has Alisson. Time will tell if we can keep it up.
Alisson's mistake is a wake-up call for the whole team. No one is not capable of making mistake ,
if not for that mistake we should be four games without conceding.