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Dirk Kuyt

mrwedwards

Updated: Mar 23, 2023


Dirk Kuyt What a man what a player, Dominic King Recently put a small piece reviewing Kuyt’s career and received great feedback, not just for how well it was written but also for the subject - The likeable character Dirk Kuyt... Kuyt was a team player, a big figure in the dressing room - he played a huge role in helping Luis Suarez settle in 2011 - but also a goalscorer. As was the case for Feyenoord, his ability to pop up at the right time was priceless and a raft of big strikes wearing Red are readily recalled. He converted the winning penalty in the 2007 Champions League semi-final, scored a hat-trick against Manchester United (2011), made himself a scourge in Merseyside derbies and also hit the target in the 2012 League Cup final. If there was a big game, Kuyt never went missing. His story has made football fans far and wide smile but, for those who worked with him down the years, there was genuine delight that one of the game's good guys had bookended his career in such magnificent fashion. A hatrick for his boy hood team as they won the title.... It is five years since Kuyt left the Premier League but he has never been forgotten by Liverpool supporters for the unrelenting commitment and effort he gave each and every day in the quest to reach the top. If any player embodied Rafa Benitez's vision of the game, it was Kuyt, who arrived in the summer of 2006 from Feyenoord for £10million having been a prolific striker but ended up morphing into a relentless right-sided forward. Few could match his fitness. When he was a young man trying to break through at Feyenoord, there were stories of how he was able to lap his team-mates on runs and those who spent time with him at Anfield would testify to how big his engine was. On the first day of pre-season training, he would break into a gallop and power around at the head of the pack. The numbers he would record in sessions at Melwood and games were always impressively high. There was, however, so much more to him than just an ability to run. Kuyt didn't have a silky-smooth style but he was hugely effective. Leighton Baines, the Everton left back, used to call him 'the nightmare'; Frank Lampard remembered how he used to pin Ashley Cole back during the frequent battles with Chelsea. 'You would look at Kuyt during the season and think to yourself "he's not a great player" but then you would come up against him,' Lampard told Sportsmail in January. 'But he would hem Ashley down by the corner flag and wouldn't let him out.' The idea of letting anyone down left Kuyt mortified. All he wanted to do was help make people happy and his joy on leaving Wembley in February 2012 with the League Cup was unconfined. The one and only Dirk Kuyt  


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