It's Virgil Van Dijk day. Or, even better, it's Southampton's day. They made a cool £75m by finally selling Van Dijk to Liverpool. There is no point even getting into the argument of how obscene the business of football has become, especially in England and Barcelona, Madrid and Paris. I just hope Van Dijk plays like a £75m player for Holland in Russia next summer. Yes, I know. Just checking. More likely, I hope he spends his money wisely on a good vacation next June and July before he returns to pre-season training at Anfield while many of his team mates are still enjoying extra time off, post-World Cup
In other news, in a completely different football stratosphere: two teams in Chile's third division were ordered to replay their penalty shoot out to decided who would be promoted to the second division. The losing team of the original match, Deportes Melipilla, protested that the last successful penalty taker for Deportes Vallenar stuttered in his run-up. Even though the referee ordered the penalty to be re-taken, and it was scored, Melipilla protested that the first attempt should have been deemed a miss.
The Chilean FA upheld the protest and ordered a replay of the shoot-out at a neutral venue. Melipilla turned up but Vallenar didn't. Melipilla were awarded the win.
Why didn't Vallenar turn up? Because most of their players were out of contract at the end of the season and they couldn't get enough players together. They went from celebrating promotion to being out of contract third division players in a few days. Maybe Virgil Van Dijk will buy them all a drink if they happen to be watching Chile at the World Cup all together next summer. Yes, stop it. Again, I do know. At least I didn't make a joke about Italy.
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