"As good as possible. Look, every team in the world would miss Virgil van Dijk. He is the best centre-half in the world, so that's of course not an easy thing to do," Jurgen Klopp said at the pre-Midtjylland press conference, quoted by the Reds' official website.
"You play the game, he gets injured and you play three days later the next game, so you have to build your new line-up. Virg is not only the best centre-half, we could play him in pretty much all the games in the last two-and-a-half, three years since he's here.
"So, of course, that's then difficult to do because all the boys play together with Virg, but they didn't play too often together with each other. Joel Matip was injured as well, so that doesn't help.
"Then Fabinho, the usual six, has to play centre-half, Joey, it's [his] obvious position so that helps then, then Trent and Robbo left and right. So they are not used to each other as much as pretty much all other pairings.
"For that, we did pretty well and that will get better 100 per cent because unfortunately pretty much all the things in life need time – and defending needs time as well to bring it on a specific level especially.
"So as a start it was OK but we all expect pretty much not perfection but not too far from perfection from us. That means there's space for improvement, that's OK. But how I said, everybody needs time to replace a massive player or person, but so far we did OK."
As a result of Jordan Pickford's reckless challenge in the Merseyside derby, Van Dijk is not expected to play until the next season due to an ACL injury. The centre-back was already left out of the Reds' Premier League squad for the first part of the campaign.
