Celtic have helped a number of players throughout their history become some of the top players in the world, with one former Hoops star on the verge of winning the English Premier League title. A previous criticism of that player has interestingly been taken back.
Virgil van Dijk has reached a level that many Celtic supporters would have hoped he would, but not many would have outright expected it to be a foregone conclusion, with Jamie Carragher opening up on the doubts he had about Van Dijk while he was at Celtic, playing in the Champions League.
Carragher watched Van Dijk for the first time in person, with one English Premier League manager in attendance to scout the Dutchman. However, Carragher explained why he had one major concern over Van Dijk’s height.
He said: (Stick to Football), “I remember going to a game, Celtic v Ajax in the Champions League in 2013/14.
“I didn’t really know too much about van Dijk. And I think Steve Bruce might have been manager of Hull or someone near them. And there was a few people watching van Dijk, and I watched him in the game.
“I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘Oh, they should have signed him’. He almost looked too big, at that time. Do you know what I mean?
“So you’re thinking, ‘Can he move? Because he almost played that cool and that sort of slow motion.
“And teams were watching him, and obviously just didn’t want to take a chance.”
It’s certainly a ‘what if’—what if Van Dijk had joined Hull in January 2014, having stayed at Celtic for another 18 months. Van Dijk was able to further progress his ball-playing skills, something that under Steve Bruce, he simply wouldn’t have with Hull City.
Hull finished 16th that season in the Premier League. They weren’t as possession-dominant as Celtic were under Neil Lennon and Ronny Deila domestically, due to being more concerned with avoiding relegation, unlike Celtic, where Van Dijk had a comparable learning experience to that of Liverpool—a club whose fans, like Celtic’s, are as passionate as they come, with the demands of starting week in, week out, massive.
For Van Dijk, he ultimately made the right decision to leave for Southampton in the summer of 2015, with that move later paving the way for his time at Liverpool, where he has won every honour there is to play for, including the Champions League in 2019.
