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Champions League winner reveals his debt to Celtic

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Virgil can Dijk believes that Liverpool are getting the dividend from his two year stint at Celtic.

When the defender moved to Scotland in 2013 there was no great fanfare as Neil Lennon made a key change in defence to replace Kelvin Wilson.

Celtic had just won their second title and reached the last 16 of the Champions League. In his first competitive match van Dijk was on the wrong end of a 2-0 defeat from Shakhtar Karagandy, for the return leg he watched from the bench as the hoops won 3-2 on aggregate thanks to a late goal from James Forrest.

Week by week the Dutch defender adapted to the demands of playing for Celtic, half a dozen years later he is a Champions League winner and regarded as the best defender in the world.

Looking back at two pivotal years van Dijk told Sky Sports:

Moving to Celtic was a little bit similar to the step I took from Willem II to Groningen. Willem II is in the south of Holland, Groningen is in the north, so [moving to Celtic] was a totally different environment with a different language.

Celtic is a massive club – people still underestimate how big it is – with European football and I spent two fantastic seasons there. I learned a lot about football and life. The European nights were outstanding, I learned a lot about how to deal with certain strikers.

Then there’s the Scottish Premiership. It isn’t the hardest in the world but it’s a league where everyone expects you to win and that was something new for me to deal with because Willem II and Groningen were never teams people expected to win.

Winning championships was something I hadn’t experienced before at a young age and it [moving to Celtic] made me a winner. It was very important for my development to go there.

By the time Ronny Deila had replaced Neil Lennon there was strong speculation linking van Dijk with a move to England, he remained uncapped by the Dutch national side.

A few months after joining Southampton the imposing defender made his debut for Holland. Today he is the captain of the Dutch national side with two appearances in the final of the Champions League, winning the trophy last June in Madrid with a 2-0 win over Spurs.

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