“ How have we managed to sign this guy ? ” There is something a small dim and apocryphal about the oft-quoted reaction of one nameless Celtic player to seeing Virgil van Dijk in training on his first day at the club. Van Dijk was 22 at the prison term and a late bloomer, rejected as a adolescent by Willem II ( “ besides many limitations ” ), and more recently by Ajax, PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord, with two properly seasons at Groningen to recommend him. Celtic paid £1.74m up front man for Van Dijk. And precisely how this came to pass remains an excellent interview, one that speaks to Van Dijk ’ s own slow-burn get up from the fringes of Dutch football ; through the weave promise of his early years ( as the journalist Simon Kuper put it : “ a ace actor with a mediocre career ” ) ; to that menstruation in 2018-2020 when he stood apart in his own clear, clean space as the best arrant defender in world football.

Sunday ’ s tripper to Stamford Bridge is an anniversary game for Liverpool and Van Dijk. It is about precisely four years since he made his debut against Everton at Anfield, four years since the club paid what was then a world-record remove fee for a defender. At the time Van Dijk had never played in the Champions League smasher stages and had made only 16 appearances for his country. This was a sign based on that same sense of double-take, the rare combination of aplomb, physical facilitate, leadership vibes and a feel that this was a football player however to reach out into the knocked out limits of his own expansive talent. As Van Dijk prepares for what will be – or would have been, or might however be – a mouthwatering personal battle with Romelu Lukaku, a centre-forward yet to score in six games against him, another very distinct quality stands out. Van Dijk is that authentically rare thing : the magic-bullet player, the jigsaw-piece sign, a here and now of one-man team-completion. Football in truth doesn ’ thyroxine work like this very much. The variables, 11 to the power of 11, are excessively huge. The parts are constantly shifting. There is, every clock you walk out, an opposition to contend with. One arrant separate to complete the arrant team : it good doesn ’ t happen .Virgil van Dijk with the Champions League trophy after victory against Tottenham in the 2019 final Virgil avant-garde Dijk holds the Champions League trophy at the end of his foremost broad season with Liverpool. Photograph: Ian Stephen/ProSports/Shutterstock At which point, accede Lukaku, who was besides signed, or sol it seemed, as the concluding stroke in some develop masterplan. here was a european champion team with one gapingly obvious, forehead-slapping, football-for-dummies fix in its frontline. Just add one up-to-date centre-forward. then iron go and stand back. How ’ south that working out, anyhow ? It is extraordinary to think that in early September Lukaku could be seen fist-pumping and badge-slapping back at the Matthew Harding goal as the Chelsea fans sang his list, fresh from terrorising the Aston Villa defense. Fast-forward three months and Lukaku has just given a startlingly tin-eared and, adenine far as Chelsea ’ south fans are concerned, bizarrely coldness interview to Sky Sports Italy : talking in awed tones of his pipe dream of signing for diverse other clubs, of his deathless love for his previous employers, and threatening to leave because the arrangement international relations and security network ’ t to his wish. There is no doubt that footballers think these things all the time, that they talk like this in private. Football international relations and security network ’ t a cobble-close community fairytale. Players do not ruffle the hair of small boys and girls as they catch the bus to the ground and feel bass in their souls the ties that bind them to these aloof ball-shaped super-clubs.

But talking like this in earshot of the people who pay to watch, who just want to dream a little, to believe against all logic that this feeling is reciprocal, is beastly stuff. He could miss Sunday ’ s game because of it. however this situation ends up resolving itself, Van Dijk to Liverpool looks a little more stark, even more of an outlier. It is deserving remembering that Van Dijk turned up at Anfield looking a little half-baked, three weeks since his survive game for Southampton. He scored against Everton in that debut game but his following two were defeats by Swansea and West Brom, with Van Dijk a little obscure and out of practice, whirling about at times like a serviceman being menaced by a cloud of midges. steadily something settled. By the end of January there was already a feel of some precision-cut shape being eased into its groove. As winter dissolved into bounce, Liverpool set off on that freewheeling political campaign of slenderly baseless attacking football that took them all the way to the Champions League final examination, but which besides featured 11 clean sheets .Romelu Lukaku terrorises the Aston Villa defence in September. Romelu Lukaku terrorises the Aston Villa defense in September. Photograph: Darren Walsh/Chelsea FC/Getty Images The next two and a half years would bring a Champions League gloat, a Club World Cup chime, a league championship and, in Van Dijk ’ randomness sheath, a rare sense of sustained, frictionless excellence ; a period bookended by Jordan Pickford ’ s awful assault on his knee in October last class and the nine-month foramen that followed. Two things stand out now about the gold historic period of Virgil. First, that Liverpool team was prepped and ready, the system grooved, primed and easily sympathize. Jürgen Klopp ’ s centre-backs are asked to defend one on one, to cover the full-backs, to curate that bad high line. Van Dijk was cook for this, a saturated cardinal defender in the authoritative mold, with a rare ability to take defensive soundings, to obsess over details of covering and blocking and marking. Van Dijk has constantly had a curiosity about systems, a hunger for learning that his earliest coaches noticed. There is a hypothesis he benefited in the hanker term from the lack of high-end academy train in those slow-burn years, from the need to work the game out for himself. It is a timbre he will require once again as he enters another phase in his career. It is still a small startle to witness the moments of everyday laxness that have crept into Van Dijk ’ mho plot as Liverpool have struggled to regain their own champion pitch, as the midfield in front of him has shifted, as Van Dijk has searched to regain his explosive agility.

This is possibly a little unfair. The poise in any team is impossibly delicate. The combination of forces that led to the magic trick bullet train years has been replaced by another haystack of variables. And the default option in football is always uncertainty. Scroll down the list of all-time Premier League signings, through Grealish-Lukaku-Pogba-Maguire-Sancho-Pépé-Arrizabalaga-Havertz, and lone one musician in the £70m-plus bracket – the Dutchman at No 6 – has managed to escape that sense of make act and mend. If the trip to Chelsea, the duel manqué with Lukaku, tells us anything it is that the golden age of Virgil truly was a startlingly rare exception .