How hard work, Football Manager and Dennis Bergkamp turned the Dane into one of the Premier League's most feared midfielders.
In a parallel universe, Christian Eriksen will be stepping out at Wembley Stadium on Sunday afternoon wearing blue. There was a time when Eriksen could conceivably have joined Chelsea; he flew over from Denmark to have trials at Cobham when he was 14 and 15.
Instinctively, he felt a little uneasy. “It was another world,” he later remembered. “The football was a little bit more powerful than what I wanted.”
And in any case, Chelsea had decided they didn’t want him. They had another kid of similar age, a midfielder with outstanding touch and control and vision, of whom great things were expected. His name was Josh McEachran.
So on the advice of Frank Arnesen, Chelsea’s sporting director, Eriksen went to Holland. To Ajax, more precisely: a club with a rich Danish tradition, stretching from Arnesen himself all the way through to the Laudrup brothers. And so began a journey that on Sunday sees Eriksen marching out at Wembley in Tottenham white. He does so as one of the leading midfielders in the Premier League. He is still only 23.
McEachran, meanwhile, is only a year younger than Eriksen, but has played just a third of the number of senior games (74 to 213). Most have been in the Championship. His most recent game was a 15-minute substitute appearance at the club where he is trying to rebuild his career: Vitesse Arnhem, in Holland.
The point is this. Talent only gets you so far. Potential, until it is realised, is just that. What makes the difference? Opportunity, commitment, luck: perhaps. But at some level, it also comes down to making the right decision.
Christian Eriksen is not especially strong or quick. He’s very deft with the ball at his feet, and he has a nice little drop of the shoulder, but in terms of pure skill, he’s a little short of the Iniesta/Modric/Götze bracket. Where he excels is in his ability to see the next three seconds of the game before anyone else, and to make the right call at exactly the right moment.
Under Mauricio Pochettino, Tottenham play a quick, vertical style based on aggressive transitions: win the ball high up the pitch, and recycle it quickly. By definition, though, the problem with transitions is that they’re often a mess. With play broken up, it takes a sharp mind to decode the blur of unfamiliar positions and angles. This is where Eriksen comes in. As his former manager at Ajax, Martin Jol, put it: “He sees more than most.”
Like many of us, Eriksen played Football Manager and Fifa obsessively as a kid. On Football Manager, he would take charge of Roma or Valencia, powering through an entire season in a couple of days. And it is tempting to speculate that Eriksen’s decision-making skills – his ability to see the game as from above – were honed from those long nights in front of a flickering computer screen. Eriksen was just one of the lucky few who had the talent to match their vision.
The other thing Eriksen has is time. Or, more specifically: timing. Eriksen is one of the world’s very best at waiting for the right instant to release the ball, whether a pass or a shot. In jazz, they talk about syncopation: the “missed beat” that throws the ear off balance. Eriksen is a maestro at playing the ball on an off-beat; just a fraction after you expect him to.
An innate sense of timing may explain why Eriksen joined Ajax instead of Barcelona, Milan, Manchester United or any of the other top clubs that were looking at him. “It was the feeling you get at a big club where they buy some new players every six months,” he said. “For me, it was just about wanting to play. At that point I was just 19 years old, so I had no hurry.” How many other footballers have so much perspective so young?
It was clear from the outset that Eriksen had a rare and special talent. He was given his Ajax first-team debut at 17, and was rarely out of the side thereafter. In 2011, he played Jack Wilshere off the park during a friendly for Denmark against England. Among those watching was Tottenham coach Tim Sherwood, who claims he rang Daniel Levy the next day and told him “he needed to sign this boy”.
Jol, his manager at Ajax, talked him up enthusiastically. “AC Milan were not interested in Jari Litmanen, Dennis Bergkamp, Wesley Sneijder and Rafael van der Vaart when they were 17,” he declared. “They are in Christian.”
In the Danish press the young Eriksen was compared, inevitably, to Michael Laudrup. But perhaps a more apposite comparison is with the man with whom he would forge a strong and lasting bond at Ajax.
“I had a lot of dealings with Bergkamp,” Eriksen recalled in an interview last year. “I started with the under-17s at Ajax and he was the assistant coach. Once or twice a week we had individual one-to-one training sessions. You just watched Bergkamp. When you see him in training, he had skills that a guy just shouldn’t be allowed to have.”
Bergkamp and Eriksen have remained close. And you wonder whether the older man sees something of his younger self in the prodigy he nurtured at Ajax. As Bergkamp puts it in his book Stillness and Speed: “There are some players who, as soon as the whistle went at the end of training… boom. They went inside, got changed, then straight in the car and away.
But the real liefhebbers [lovers of the game] stayed behind to practise. At Arsenal it was always the same players, eight or nine, who stayed behind after training.”
Now read what Sherwood had to say about Eriksen when he was Tottenham manager. “I drag him off the training field every day and say: ‘that’s enough, Christian, it’s getting dark, go home to the missus’.” Idealistic passion for the game and old-school graft are often seen as polar opposites. For Bergkamp and Eriksen, they go hand in hand. Eriksen, by all accounts, is a liefhebber.
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