Celtic gave Van Dijk the launchpad to becoming the greatest defender

ALMOST 10 years after leaving Celtic for Southampton, Virgil van Dijk’s impact on the Parkhead club can be measured in more ways than the pair of Premiership titles and the League Cup he won across two seasons.

Prior to his £13million transfer to the south coast, top English clubs had come to view the finest individuals playing in Scotland with a certain degree of suspicion.

Where once they queued up to snare the likes of Kenny Dalglish and Joe Jordan, the turn of the millennium brought with it an unfortunate change in attitude.

Once viewed by English scouts as ripe pickings for top footballers, the prevailing feeling was that anyone plying their trade north of the border had to be fundamentally flawed.

Every EPL club looked closely at Van Dijk. Newcastle and Arsenal thought about a bid north of £10m and thought again.

Then Saints manager Ronald Koeman was the only person willing to trust the evidence of his eyes. The rest is history.

Three years later, Van Dijk was sold to Liverpool for £75m, then a world record fee for a defender which now looks like grand larceny. Now a two-time English title winner, he’s held the Champions League aloft, been a runner-up in the Ballon d’Or and is now the Anfield club’s skipper.

Inarguably one of the finest defenders to ever play the game, he became the one that got away in boardrooms the length and breadth of England.

At a stroke, his transfer from Celtic changed the perception of Scottish football as a backwater and served to strengthen his club’s bargaining position in many future transactions.

In the time since Van Dijk left Glasgow, Celtic have sold six players for more money. Four of those — Odsonne Edouard, Kristoffer Ajer, Kieran Tierney and Matt O’Riley — moved to EPL clubs. Those sides who missed the boat with the Dutchman won’t make the same mistake again.

To cut them a little slack, Van Dijk in his time at Celtic wasn’t quite the player whose present claim to being the best centre back in the world is uncontested.

He was 21 at the time when he moved from Groningen for a scandalous fee of £2.5m.

There were more uncertain moments in two years in Glasgow than he’s endured in eight years on Merseyside.

But when he was good in a green and white jersey — as he was more often than not — he was absolutely frightening. His strength, speed and aerial ability were all you could possibly want from a central defender. He was a born leader.

All of those who watched him as he adjusted to his new surroundings at Lennoxtown were convinced that all that was required for him to develop into a world class talent was time and patience.

‘I said to him on the first day: “Enjoy yourself here, son. You won’t be here for long”,’ revealed Neil Lennon, the manager who signed him. ‘I was amazed he was in Scotland for so long.’

Charlie Mulgrew first recognised that Van Dijk might be on a different level to any other defender he’d played with during a closed-door pre-season friendly.

‘£2.5m from Groningen we paid for him,’ he recalled. ‘There were a lot of signings like that at Celtic. It was a toss of a coin, what you were getting.

‘But he immediately looked the part. It was at the training ground and Crewe had come up for a pre-season friendly. He strode forward and hit the ball from about 35 yards and hit the underside of the bar. You were thinking, “This guy’s all right”.’

If Mulgrew and Lennon and everyone else in attendance that summer could see this was a potential superstar in the making, why had no one in the Netherlands thought the same? Van Dijk’s formative years in his homeland was a long story of struggle, rejection and being largely under appreciated.

Born in Breda, he learned his trade playing on the streets. He took on a job as a dishwasher to make ends meet when he was picked up by Willem II but was let go by the club for having ‘too many limitations’.

There were many youth coaches at Groningen who felt the same way when he landed there too.

He made his debut as a substitute against Den Haag at the end of 2010-11, but was denied a breakthrough season the following year by appendicitis. He required life-saving surgery, spent 13 days in hospital and couldn’t walk for 10 days.

In the fullness of time he recovered and thrived. The following year, there was talk of a move to PSV Eindhoven only for them to opt for Jeffrey Bruma. Van Dijk and his agent tried to force the issue by going straight to Ajax. He was again to be disappointed by director of football Marc Overmars who flatly rejected him.

Lennon had been persuaded to take a look and for the life of him could not understand why the defender was even available.

‘I couldn’t believe it when I was watching the footage,’ he recalled.

‘You know when you watch players on video, you are thinking “there’s got to be something wrong with this kid, he’s got to have an eye missing or something like that”.

‘He just looked like Rio Ferdinand. He’s galloping from defence through the midfield, playing one-twos, joining in the attacks, recovering, heading the ball in both boxes, and you’re thinking “wow”.

‘You go and see him and you are looking around to see if there’s any other scouts there. Then you get him in and you think “what a player”.’

His debut came as a late substitute for Efe Ambrose in a win at Pittodrie in mid-August.

Three days later, though, Van Dijk’s hopes of a seamless introduction to life at Celtic were shattered.

As Lennon’s side lost the first leg of a Champions League qualifier to Shakhter Karagandy, the Dutchman was culpable at both goals.

‘We got beat 2-0 away in Kazakhstan,’ Mulgrew recalled. ‘He got dropped for the home leg because he got bullied by the striker.

‘He was used to playing in Holland and having a lot of the ball and probably a lot of it on the ground. And all of a sudden we went there and they were just banging the ball long.

‘But he learned his lesson well. He never played in the return leg, but he never left the team after that.’

Van Dijk did actually feature in that never-to-be-forgotten three-goal comeback against Karagandy, but only as a time-wasting substitute for James Forrest after the winger had netted what proved to be the winner.

His first taste of the group stage of the Champions League was to be a painful one.

Pitched into a section containing Barcelona, AC Milan and Ajax, Celtic’s only victory came at home against the Dutch. The final night was a forgettable 6-1 mauling in the Nou Camp.

‘It would have been more without him,’ insisted team-mate Joe Ledley. ‘We weren’t at it at all. Virgil, and credit to him, he was brilliant.’

With Rangers then a lower league club, the Scottish title was always Celtic’s to lose. They chalked up 99 points as Van Dijk claimed his first major honour.

But Morton, then struggling at the foot of the Championship, would put paid to his hopes of adding the League Cup to his collection when they sensationally won by a single goal at Celtic Park. Aberdeen did likewise with a 2-1 victory in the Scottish Cup in February.

Van Dijk’s first season was certainly a success with his attributes becoming clearer as the months rolled by. Yet there was still room for improvement.

With Ronny Deila taking the managerial baton from Lennon in the summer, Van Dijk had to adjust to the sound of a new voice.

Celtic also had to get accustomed to a temporary new home. With Parkhead being used for the Commonwealth Games, their Champions League qualifiers were staged at Murrayfield.

Van Dijk scored twice as KR Reykjavik were dispatched. Deila’s side were beaten by Legia Warsaw yet earned a reprieve due to the Poles fielding an ineligible player.

They returned to their home in Glasgow in time to face Maribor only to lose after drawing the first leg in Slovenia.

Brought in after leading little known Stromsgodset to the title, Deila struggled to find the results to win over the doubters.

Celtic lost at Inverness and drew with Dundee and Motherwell. When Hamilton Accies won at Parkhead in October, they were top of the league.

The Europa League provided some respite. Celtic progressed in a section containing Salzburg, Dinamo Zagreb and Astra Giurgiu to set up a last 32 tie with Inter Milan.

For all the side struggled for consistency, the performances of Van Dijk were improving by the week.

With the impressive Belgian Jason Denayer beside him, he began to look imperious.

There were domestic games when he appeared to be a class apart from any other player on the field. Strikers couldn’t get past him. Midfielders couldn’t get the ball off him.

‘I’ve never known a guy so tall, so strong and technically good in all my life,’ recalled Kris Commons.

‘He was so comfortable on the ball — aware and technically brilliant.

‘He could play at No10. There was nothing that he didn’t have.’

Ledley concurs. ‘He was so calm,’ said the Welshman. ‘He could hit shots, win headers. He was strong, quick and you could see back then how good of a player he was going to be.’

As a consequence of Rangers’ financial implosion in 2012, Van Dijk would never play a league game against the Ibrox club. His only taste of the derby would come in a League Cup semi-final of that second season.

Deila’s side won 2-0 that day against a Rangers side which was more accustomed to facing Championship outfits. He scarcely broke sweat.

Inter would prove to be more troublesome. After a stunning 3-3 draw at Parkhead, Celtic were eliminated after going down by a goal in the San Siro with Van Dijk controversially being sent off.

He was also red carded at Tannadice for an off the ball scuffle only to win the appeal which allowed him to face Dundee United in the League Cup final which Celtic won 2-0.

Celtic’s hopes of a Treble were dashed in hugely controversial circumstances. Inverness edged a thrilling five-goal Scottish Cup semi-final after the officials somehow missed a clear handball by Josh Meekings to prevent Leigh Griffiths from scoring.

Deila was badly wronged on that occasion, but the campaign in general left a lot to be desired.

Celtic still won the title with 92 points. That was seven fewer than the previous year under Lennon.

Although there was no question of Deila not getting a second term, there were growing concerns around the direction the team was taking.

And unless there was demonstrable evidence that the picture was going to change, there was an acceptance that Van Dijk would soon be looking for a way out.

He’d been in three full Dutch squads without earning his first full cap. With Danny Blind set to succeed Guus Hiddink, he had to do everything possible to catch the eye.

Everything seemed to hinge on the Champions League qualifiers the following season.

Reach the group stage and the Dutchman would have a reason to stick around. Fall at that hurdle and Celtic would need the money.

Alas, an agonising aggregate loss to Malmo sealed the deal. Van Dijk played his last game for Celtic in a 3-1 win against St Johnstone on August 29 then phoned his team-mates to tell him he was leaving for England.

Three honours seem like a scant reward for his time in Glasgow given his ability and the fact that Rangers were rebuilding.

He was also overlooked for the individual awards. Commons scooped both of the PFA Scotland and the SFWA player of the year awards in his first season with Stefan Johansen and Craig Gordon honoured in his second.

The fact remains that there was no great hullabaloo about these polls at the time. Van Dijk was unquestionably a superb player for Celtic, one who should have ticked every box of every big gun looking on from down south.

But, at the age of 23, the truth is that he was not quite the finished article. To their eternal credit, Southampton accelerated his development and moulded him into the complete defender across two-and-a-half seasons.

After a fruitless first year at Liverpool, Jurgen Klopp knew what and who was required. His successor Arne Slot will be eternally thankful that the German did.

Having recently signed a new two-year contract extension, this exceptional talent will be keeping forwards at bay for a while yet. The moral of his story is that world-class players in the making can often be hidden in plain sight.

‘Virgil van Dijk is a Rolls-Royce,’ said former Celtic skipper Scott Brown.

‘He cruised it in the SPL and he’s cruising it in the Premier League. He has now shown that he is the best defender in the world.

‘What we’re seeing from him these days is no surprise to me. The only surprise was that, when he left Celtic, only Southampton came in for him.’