Virgil van Dijk has garnered a reputation for being one of the strongest defenders in the Premier League.
- The towering Dutchman is certainly the type of player you wouldn’t want to be in a physical battle with, but according to Colin Kazim-Richards, the Liverpool star’s strength may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
- Speaking on Filthy Fellas, Kazim-Richards stated that he actually doesn’t know how strong
is because no striker dare challenge him physically, stating that if a big centre-forward decided to truly play up against the 32-year-old, it could be a different story.
- Kazim-Richards shared his view on the £75m defender and his strength.
“I don’t know if he was tough. I played against him at PSG. There’s nobody I’ve come up against physically where I’ve thought ‘ah’. I give Lescott his due, he was physical. If you hit him it was like two walls coming together. I never played against Virgil. I would say that Virgil is big, but nobody plays up against him so I don’t know how strong he is. They don’t play against him, that’s not to take anything away from Virgil, but when you see strikers play up against him it could be a different story,” Kazim-Richards said.
- This is a very interesting point of view to have on Van Dijk and his strength.
The centre-half is clearly physically gifted, but, come to think of it, we’ve never actually seen a striker try to bully him.
Even the likes of Aleksandar Mitrovic and Romelu Lukaku – who are two of the strongest strikers the Premier League has seen in recent years, changed their game against Van Dijk, and perhaps if they’d given him a taste of his own medicice, they could’ve gotten the better of him.
Van Dijk is incredibly strong, but, as Kazim-Richards says, it’s rare to actually see him tested on that front.
