Eriksen’s awesome but doesn’t quite boast the ‘Wow!’ factor of Hazard

DURING a visit to Ajax to catch up with my old Nottingham Forest teammate Bryan Roy a few years ago, he nodded towards a young Dane by the name of Christian Eriksen.

“He’ll be top drawer one day,” Brian told me and I’m not sure there are many who have watched him over the years at Tottenham who’d try to argue he got that one wrong.

Eriksen has been excellent, particularly these past 18 months, and there’s no wonder he is being linked with a move to Real Madrid.

Even so, if I had anything to do with Real’s recruitment process, it’d be a man in the opposite dressing room at Wembley tonight who I’d be pushing for.

I see Chelsea’s Eden Hazard reaching a level at the Bernabeu that Eriksen could not. By fine margins, of course, but the Belgian just seems a more likely fit for the attacking Galactico model and has a ‘Wow!’ factor I don’t see in the Tottenham man.

I wonder if that’s because Eriksen comes across as a bit quiet, a bit shy, and perhaps a bit of a nice kid. Because when he goes quiet, he goes very quiet, and that would concern me from a Real perspective and have me wondering if he’d be able to deliver 9/10 every week. You look at the personalities who have made it at the Bernabeu and wonder if Eriksen (below, with Hazard) could get swallowed up by it all. There are similarities between him and Luka Modric as footballers at this stage of their careers.

But they come from very different backgrounds and I’m not sure Eriksen has the fight that has helped Modric become a winner of the Ballon d’Or.

I’d draw the line at saying Eriksen was

flaky, but I’d certainly think they’d look at him and ask, ‘Could he thrive in this arena?’ Hazard, on the other hand, would probably feel it was his God-given right to play for Real Madrid – certainly there’s a whiff of that in the way he has been so open about wanting to go there.

To be fair to Eriksen, we know Hazard can turn it on and off himself.

He has had seasons when he has been quiet, surly and moody. But we’ve also seen him dominate games from start to finish and singlehandedly win far more matches than Eriksen has. To play for Real you have to be like a FIFA player, on-tap brilliant, as Gareth Bale has found to his cost at times.

Bale has been 8 or 9/10 for a lot of his career there, yet he has still come in for criticism.

If Real do push the button on taking Eriksen from Tottenham or Hazard from Chelsea this summer then the one thing we can be sure of is the heralding of a new dawn in La Liga.

Because for either to be a marquee signing at Real or Barcelona shows things are changing at the top clubs.

At their very, very best, neither would be on the same planet as a Lionel Messi or Ronaldo and I’m convinced we will see a far more even distribution in talent in all of the top teams in the years to come.