It's a peculiar twist of football fate that Virgil van Dijk is only now, at the age of 31, experiencing his first international tournament.
That a player who has swept the board in club football during his near five years at Liverpool is only just now performing for the Netherlands at a major competition is a quirk that will surely have rankled with Van Dijk prior to kick-off in Qatar last month.
A serious knee injury suffered in October 2020 at Everton robbed him of the chance of skippering his compatriots at last summer's European championships after he took the sensible decision not to rush his comeback.
