Liverpool's Virgil van Dijk made 70-yard pass to Mo Salah look so easy

Virgil van Dijk plays football so effortlessly.

Not literally, of course, because the Liverpool star no doubt puts in the hard yards and then some, but there’s just something about the way in which he glides around the pitch that makes it look as though he’s not even breaking a sweat.

It’s not just the Dutchman’s flowing locks that look majestic, but also each slide-tackle, header, sprint and – perhaps most impressively of all – pass that he plays.

The days of centre-backs simply being big old lumps who throw their head in front of everything and cannon the ball into Row Z every 10 seconds is long gone.

In are the days of ball-playing defenders who have it in their arsenal to sprint like Thierry Henry, read the play like Andrea Pirlo and pass the ball like Steven Gerrard.

And while, don’t worry, we’re not saying that Van Dijk has mastered those skills to quite that standard, his outrageous ability to spray the ball all over the pitch shows that he’s just about as close as a centre-back has ever gotten to achieving it in modern football.

This is, after all, the man who came just a whisker away from winning the 2019 Ballon d’Or.

And Liverpool fans will back us up because there have been plenty of examples where Van Dijk has taken off the handbrake and decided to start attacks all by himself with a stunning pass from deep.

Nunes to Liverpool ON (Football Terrace)

In fact, that was actually the case as recently as Thursday with Van Dijk showing the world that he’s just as peerless as ever with a pitch-traversing pass that looked as though it didn’t cost him a cent of energy.

During the 5-0 win over RB Leipzig where Darwin Nunez helped himself to four goals, Liverpool’s star defender decided that a superhuman pass from the