It's only a small sample, and anyone who knows their football will tell you to hold your horses before crowning a 21-year-old on the back of a few months of data. But when the numbers are this striking, you'd be doing readers a disservice by ignoring them. Jeremy Jacquet is currently sitting second in the Premier League for duel success rate, registering an eye-catching 76.3%, and that figure is prompting some genuinely fascinating comparisons.

The source data draws on 3,019 minutes of Premier League action for Jacquet, a fraction of the sample size we're working with elsewhere, so context is everything here. But even with that caveat stamped firmly across the top, those are the kind of early-career returns that get recruitment departments quietly congratulating themselves.

The comparison point the data leans on is about as demanding as it gets. Looking at the last five Premier League seasons of Liverpool's long-serving centre-back, Virgil van Dijk averaged a duel success rate of 72.16% across 15,823 minutes of top-flight football. That's a seasoned professional operating at the peak of his powers over a sustained period. Nobody is seriously suggesting a 21-year-old newcomer has already surpassed that benchmark.

Jacquet's average across his Premier League minutes comes in at 68.23%, meaningfully below Van Dijk's career average at the club, as you'd fully expect. The gap is real. But the direction of travel is what catches the eye. If those numbers hold anywhere close to their current level across a full season, you're looking at a young centre-back tracking towards truly elite duel statistics. That's a trajectory worth getting excited about, even if a degree of regression is probably coming as Premier League forwards work him out.

There was genuine anxiety on Merseyside when Ibrahima Konate departed on a free. Replacing a physical, dominant centre-back without losing the aerial presence that had become part of Liverpool's defensive identity felt like a real challenge. The fear was that the solution might come with compromises baked in.

What the data suggests instead is that Liverpool have not only matched the aerial baseline Konate provided as Van Dijk's partner, but also brought in a defender who is considerably more comfortable with the ball at his feet and progressing play from deep. That's an upgrade in profile, not just a like-for-like replacement, and it points to a recruitment operation that knew exactly what it was doing when it moved for Jacquet in January.

None of this is to say the work is done or that Jacquet is the finished article. He is 21, he is still learning, and the Premier League has a habit of finding out young defenders once the honeymoon period ends. There will be difficult nights ahead, and those duel numbers will almost certainly soften over the course of a full campaign. Patience remains the appropriate response.

But the early signs are genuinely encouraging. Liverpool went into the summer with a question mark hanging over one of the most important positions on the pitch, and right now that question mark is looking considerably less threatening. If Jacquet continues to develop at anything close to his current rate, the Reds could have their next great defensive partnership in the making, and that is a thought worth sitting with.