The concept of a greatest ever month doesn’t really work in football. And even it did, you’d probably choose a May when you went gathering cups, rather than a December in any season.

However, December 2018 could lay a claim to being the best month in Liverpool’s entire history. The Reds became only the fifth side (and fourth club) to win seven top flight English matches in one month. Teams won’t play that many games in a month that often of course, but to win them all considering the physical demands involved is still a remarkable achievement. And in case you’ve forgotten – you won’t have – Liverpool secured their spot in the knock-out stages of the Champions League by beating Napoli in December too. It really was quite a month.

With over 10,000 votes cast across the eight post-match polls, there were some very worthy candidates for this award this month. Alisson picked up the most TTTMOTM awards, with three. Mohamed Salah scored seven goals and assisted five more, which some players would be pleased with across a whole season. Perhaps my favourite fact from totting up the votes is that Divock Origi and Jordan Pickford averaged the same number of votes per appearance (104). Some things are just meant to be.

However, with the man of the match award at Wolves and at least 148 votes in six of the eight polls, our player of the month is Virgil van Dijk. While his defending was exemplary, he made some telling contributions at the front end of the team too: a goal at Wolves, an assist for Firmino’s lead-taking goal at Burnley, and most Kopites also gave him an assist for Origi’s derby winner. That ballooning shot was totally deliberate, right, Virgil?

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