Virgil van Dijk was a player Neil Lennon famously told not to bother unpacking his bags because he wouldn’t be staying long – straight after his first training session with Celtic. Lennon clearly recognised talent when he saw it in Van Dijk but it seems managers in England didn’t catch on quite as quickly.
Former Spurs boss and SkySports pundit Tim Sherwood was one such manager and also admits pre-conceived notions of the standard of competition the former Celtic defender was playing in was a big reason for passing a judgement too early on a player who went on to become arguably the best central defender in world football.
“We are looking at a guy here in Virgil van Dijk,” Sherwood told Premier League Productions (via our pals at Empire of the Kop). “He played at Celtic. No one wanted to take him.
“Everyone was having a look, myself included because he was playing in an environment that was non-competitive. You couldn’t really judge him.
“Then he goes to Southampton. Then you think, ‘oh, we might have missed the boat here. He might be too expensive for us now’. He was proving that he could play in the Premier League.
“And Liverpool have done their homework, spoke to Jurgen Klopp, he said ‘this is the man I want’. And he has come in there with the personality which he has got. That helps. He is very humble. I think he has done absolutely brilliant.”
Virgil van Dijk stood out like a sore thumb in Scotland and it wasn’t simply because the standard is admittedly lower in Scottish football, it was because he was an outstanding talent. And for professional recruitment specialists and indeed managers like Tim Sherwood, they really should have judged the player and his potential rather than the competition he was playing in, had they done so they might even be in a job these days!
Celtic eventually sold the player to Southampton for £13m from where he ultimately made his big money move to Liverpool for £75m, with Celtic inserting a nice sell on percentage along the way.
Of course, Liverpool won’t begrudge a penny of that transfer fee, after all Van Dijk has been a wonderful signing for the Anfield club, who bought the defender and goalkeeper Alisson for the money they received from selling Coutinho to Barcelona, so the fee spent was really just a case of swings and roundabouts for Liverpool.
For Celtic we got to witness the abilities of Van Dijk first hand and Southampton eventually got a player who they really shouldn’t have had a sniff at, given he was already good enough for a Top six English club without the need of using Southampton as a bridge to a team like Liverpool.
Tim Sherwood seems big enough to admit he got that one wrong; I wonder how many other EPL managers thought the same but are keeping it quiet in order to protect their reputations.
Niall J
