Reaction'We were ready for a battle' - Virgil van Dijk assesses win over Inter

The Reds won Wednesday’s Champions League last-16 first-leg tie at San Siro thanks to a resolute collective display that was crowned by late goals from Roberto Firmino and Mohamed Salah.

Post-match, Van Dijk spoke to BT Sport. Read on for a transcript…

On a ‘toe-to-toe’ battle between the sides…

Tough, a tough place to come of course. Very good team, consistent, difficult to break down of course. The atmosphere was incredible, I really enjoyed it out there. And obviously it was very important with the set-pieces in the end again - that’s obviously a very good strength of ours and hopefully we can keep on using this. I think it was a very solid performance and a good result to take back home.

On Firmino’s 75th-minute opener puncturing Inter’s momentum…

Yeah, but it’s normal. You try everything and they did very well, I must say, defensively. It was very difficult to beat your marker but we found the space and [got] this great goal. In the end I think it’s a well deserved win of course, in my opinion, but it was very hard work and it will be the same in Liverpool.

On the fact Liverpool had to be defensively resilient…

Everyone expected to be under pressure because they are a very good team and it’s the Champions League. I think also one of the messages before the game was, ‘You need to be ready to suffer, you need to be ready to do the hard work’ and we definitely did. It’s a very, very good performance, a clean sheet and well, happy days.