WHEN Rav van den Berg was pondering his future in the summer, he was made aware of interest from Borussia Dortmund, Roma and AC Milan. Instead, he ended up at Middlesbrough. Seven months on, and while he might be experiencing the Championship rather than the Champions League, he does not regret a thing.

Had he headed to Signal Iduna Park or the San Siro, he would almost certainly have spent the current campaign training with the Under-21s and desperately hoping to secure an occasional place on the substitutes’ bench for the first team. On Teesside, however, he has made 26 senior appearances, 24 of which have been starts, and rapidly become an integral part of Michael Carrick’s first-choice line-up.

At some stage in the future, his career might well take him to some of Europe biggest stadiums. For now, though, he is revelling in life at the Riverside.

“I had other options in the summer,” said van den Berg, whose signing from PEC Zwolle already looks like an inspired piece of transfer business from Boro. “But I definitely think I made the right decision.

“I have a brother who plays football (Sepp), and so I spoke to him about the move I was going to make. He was extremely positive about it. He played in the Championship on loan (at Preston from Liverpool), and said it was a really important part of his career. He talked about how much he learned there.

“It was great for him, and it helped convince me this was the right thing for me. Of course, I made my own decision, but to hear that from him was really nice, and I’m already really happy about the choice I made.

“This has been a really good move for me. It’s been an amazing experience so far. I came to the club to play matches regularly, that’s the main reason I came here. You never really know how things are going to go – it is a new country, and a new team – so I didn’t really know what was going to happen. But I feel like it is working out really well. I’ve enjoyed every moment I’ve been here, and I think it’s been really good for me.”

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Van den Berg’s footballing ability was never really in doubt given the standard of the sides that had been monitoring his progress at Zwolle.

The challenge for the 19-year-old following his summer switch to Middlesbrough was always going to be handling the rough-and-tumble of life in the Championship, especially as a defender coming up against rugged, experienced forwards.

While van den Berg has spent some of his time playing at right-back, he has been switched to centre-half in recent weeks and played alongside Dael Fry in Sunday’s derby draw with Sunderland. Given the quality of his performance against the Black Cats, it is safe to say that England’s second tier does not really hold any fears for him.

“If you compare this league to the Dutch league, then it is definitely very different,” said the Dutch Under-21 international. “On the footballing side of things, I think I am quite comfortable, but I have had to learn a lot of things in this league because it is a different type of football to playing at home.

“Defensively, I think I am going to learn so much. When you watch this league, you can definitely compare it to the Premier League in terms of the speed, the physicality and the intensity of every game. It is much closer to the Premier League in that respect than to the Dutch league. I’ve had to get used to that, and I think it is going to stand me in such good stead for the rest of my career.”

While van den Berg was happy to fill in at right-back prior to the arrival of Luke Ayling, he definitely sees his long-term future at centre-half.

“I am a centre-back,” he said, when quizzed about his preferred role. “If the manager wants to play me at right-back, then of course I’m going to play there, but I think my best position is centre-back and longer term, that is where I see myself playing. I think I am better in the centre-back position than I am at right-back, so it was nice to get the chance to play there at the weekend. I think that is where I am at my best.”

Van den Berg thought his weekend display was going to contribute to a Boro win when Marcus Forss fired the home side ahead shortly after the hour mark, and there was a collective sense of disappointment when the game ended in a 1-1 draw.

“It felt like we were the stronger team for most of the second half,” he said. “We should really have scored another goal, and then it might have been an easy win. We didn’t do it, but should still have taken a clean sheet. It was disappointing we didn’t do that, so it felt more like a loss than a draw. But we move on to Bristol now and we need to win that.”