After Barcelona's 3-0 defeat of Liverpool in the first leg of the Champions League semi-finals, Virgil van Dijk spoke to the press about the quality of Leo Messi, who scored a fantastic brace.
"He's a fantastic player, it's very obvious. I think the difficult thing is that when we attack, he is waiting somewhere in the corner or anywhere," said the Dutch defender.
"But when you lose easy or difficult balls, they try to look for him, and he gives us problems. I think he's the best player in the world, he's got that extra element too, which he's shown over the years," he said.
He also agreed with his teammate Andrew Robertson, who did not hesitate to praise Leo Messi and qualify him as the best player in the world: "We know how good he is. We are not going to hide it. He is the best player in the world. But we thought we'd done pretty well. He scored after a rebound and then look at that free kick, you can't do anything about it.
"How many times he has done that? He's a world-class player. Hopefully we can stop him on Tuesday and we'll see what we can do," said the Liverpool defender.