Nations League 2019: Virgil van Dijk says he does not care about England fans booing him

Virgil van Dijk says the booing by England fans doesn’t affect him, nor did he care about going a full season without getting dribbled past.

A brilliant campaign for the 28-year-old ended on a slightly flat note, as his Netherlands side were beaten 1-0 by hosts Portugal in the Nations League final.

That defeat marked the second successive game in which England fans booed Van Dijk, after Thursday’s 3-1 win over Gareth Southgate’s side in the semi-finals. Many English fans attended both of Sunday’s matches, and again made a point of loudly booing Van Dijk.

Asked afterwards, he said he barely notices.

I don’t really care, if somebody boos me or boos the team, we’re trying to win the game,” Van Dijk said. “We know we have a lot of support behind us anyway and at the end of the day it’s us players who have to do the job, and it doesn’t affect me at all.”

Nor did the widely-repeated stat that he has not been dribbled past in any match in the entirety of the 2018-19 season. This was again put to Van Dijk after another personally successful game, but he was far more bothered by the fact the Dutch lost 1-0 to Goncalo Guedes’ second-half goal.

“No, I told, it was never on my mind. I try to win the game, that’s the only thing that’s on my mind.”

Van Dijk was otherwise proud of the progress the Dutch side has made.

“Well, yeah, obviously we wanted to win, that’s the main thing. We have to keep our heads up high, recover from all of this, learn from this whole experience, because we have a young group, and make sure we qualify for the Euros.

“I think before this tournament if someone said we would be in the final, we would beat France, Germany, England, then somebody would say you’re crazy, so we have to be proud of ourselves, we made big progress as a team, in and out of the pitch, so we have to keep going and make sure we qualify for the Euros.”