As Pieter Huistra looked around the dressing room, his Groningen side still trailing by four goals with just one half of a play-off game against Den Haag remaining, the solution suddenly dawned on him.

He ordered the teenage defender making his full debut to switch to a role in attack. In the rousing recovery that followed, Virgil van Dijk would make his mark.

“We had lost the first leg 5-1. It was 1-1 and we had to do something special, move to special tactics,” Huistra, who had arrived at the Eredivisie club in the north of the Netherlands as head coach the previous summer, recalled. “We knew from his time at Willem II that he could play as a striker and thought he could do