Virgil van Dijk's first LFC year: Heartbreak in Kiev
In May, the Reds reached the Champions League final in Kiev, where they faced Real Madrid. It was to end in disappointment, but Van Dijk explains why it's only accentuated everyone's desire to get back to that stage...
The final was tough to take. I remember, we came back from Kiev and landed at seven in the morning or something, still full of so much adrenaline – it’s unbelievable. There are so many things that go through your head like: could you have done things differently? You think about so many things.
Ultimately, it’s an experience I will take with me again and learn from in certain ways. We can learn from it to make us even stronger and hopefully we’re going to go to that stage again and do better than we did in Kiev. It’s something I will learn from and it’s going to make me a better player again.
I really enjoyed all of the build-up to the final. The whole final, the whole ceremony, everything. We went to Marbella, we had a camp there, we bonded together, we weren’t nervous, we were so excited. We had a feeling we could definitely do it. I think everyone at Liverpool had that feeling. I enjoyed it all and I want to do it again.
It’s just a fantastic event with so many things, people all over the world watching – everyone is watching and everyone wants to be there as well. The funny thing is, the year before I went to the final in Cardiff to watch Real Madrid against Juventus. That was the first time I watched a Champions League final live, so it was a bit strange that a year later I was playing in it. Everything around it, the whole show, the performances, the atmosphere, it was something I really, really enjoyed. I said to my friend back then, ‘We need to be in a final like this.’ That it happened that quick is something pretty crazy. You never forget those things and I won’t either.
Sometimes you’d be on the couch in the evening before the final and you’d think, ‘What if we won it? It’s going to be something so special, you’ll be in Liverpool’s history books…’ Sometimes you had that feeling of how big it could be. With all the attention we had, it started to really feel like it was going to happen. But it didn’t.
As a player, losing a final can definitely give you a huge hunger to get back there and win it. Now I want to do everything that is possible to reach that stage again. It’s tough, but we need to keep doing what we’re doing and hopefully it’s going to happen again one day.