{"id":545096,"date":"2025-11-02T23:25:15","date_gmt":"2025-11-02T23:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/545096\/"},"modified":"2025-11-02T23:25:15","modified_gmt":"2025-11-02T23:25:15","slug":"virgil-van-dijk-hits-back-at-wayne-rooneys-lazy-criticism-of-liverpool-liverpool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/545096\/","title":{"rendered":"Virgil van Dijk hits back at Wayne Rooney\u2019s \u2018lazy\u2019 criticism of Liverpool | Liverpool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virgil van Dijk has called Wayne Rooney\u2019s criticism of him and Mohamed Salah<\/a> this season \u201clazy\u201d and has hit out at \u201cridiculous takes\u201d during Liverpool\u2019s recent bad run.<\/p>\n

Rooney, talking on his BBC podcast, had said there had been a lack of leadership from the Liverpool captain and Salah this season and that their body language had not been right. From late September to late October, Liverpool lost six times in seven games, including at home to Manchester United<\/a> and away to Crystal Palace<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Van Dijk has responded to the former United and England striker yet admitted some criticism does get to his teammates. The Liverpool<\/a> captain said of Rooney: \u201cI didn\u2019t hear him last year. It doesn\u2019t hurt me. Just to come back to this particular player, obviously a legend, a big player of the game who inspired so many, I can say only positive things, but I feel that comment is just a bit of a lazy criticism. It\u2019s easy to blame the older players but he knows as well as everyone else that we do it together and try to help each other to get out of this. There are so many platforms nowadays that everyone can say whatever they like and it gets blown up.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the 34-year-old did say some players can be affected by the talk around the Premier League champions, who are seven points behind the leaders, Arsenal. \u201cWhat I have noticed, over the last couple of weeks especially, is that there is a lot of noise that you have no control over and that we have to deal with as a team,\u201d he said. \u201cSome of those takes are absolutely ridiculous. But you have to deal with that. It\u2019s outside noise that can reach certain players, the group. It\u2019s about sticking together.<\/p>\n

Wayne Rooney questioned Virgil van Dijk\u2019s leadership during his BBC podcast. Photograph: John Walton\/PA<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd when there are difficult moments, I try to help my teammates. I try to put them in front of me and want to make them perform as in the best possible shape and then when things don\u2019t go well then that\u2019s the world we live in and people question loads of stuff, especially when you lose.\u201d<\/p>\n

Liverpool got out of their results rut on Saturday night with a 2-0 home win against Aston Villa \u2013 in which Salah scored his 250th goal<\/a> for the club \u2013 and Van Dijk highlighted how some people\u2019s tune had changed since the losing run started. He said: \u201cI think it\u2019s a funny thing, isn\u2019t it? Because last year we didn\u2019t hear anything about this, because obviously things were going well, and we were also seen as the leaders, and this year when things are not going as well as we want, then we\u2019re not doing our job properly.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo that\u2019s the life we live. We feel that responsibility. We want to lead by example. Obviously I can only speak for myself in this case, by the way. I know I\u2019m the captain, I know that if we have not the best results or not great performances, then myself and the manager will definitely always be questioned. That\u2019s part and parcel, you know.<\/p>\n

skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n

Sign up to Football Daily<\/p>\n

Kick off your evenings with the Guardian’s take on the world of football<\/p>\n

Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve mentioned it after previous games, we have to stick together, focus on the task ahead, winning games, that\u2019s the only thing we can control. And it\u2019s not easy to do that for everyone, but for me I\u2019m mature enough and I have a very stable life that I will be able to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Virgil van Dijk has called Wayne Rooney\u2019s criticism of him and Mohamed Salah this season \u201clazy\u201d and has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8815],"tags":[748,393,4884,179,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-545096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-liverpool","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-liverpool","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115482691088684553","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}