DRIES MERTENS

Any team lucky enough to recruit the long-serving Belgium international on a free transfer can be sure of a hat-trick of welcome benefits: the versatility to operate as main striker, left-winger or front-line floater, lots of goals and a gutsy attitude.

The 32-year-old, a Neapolitan favourite for the past seven seasons, might physically be a tiny willow in a forest of towering oaks, but he can always be relied upon to put in a shift. Hyperactive and bristling with a will to win, he is always ready to go that extra mile for his colours.

He has certainly not had the easiest of career paths, judged too small and frail to make the grade at the Anderlecht academy, given the same brush-off by Gent and forced to reconfigure in nonelite Benelux leagues at Eendracht

“On the pitch I’m quick, I’m direct, I try things, I put in crosses. The fans can see that I don’t calculate”

Aalst in Belgium’s third division and AGOVV in the Dutch second tier.

He had to battle for top-flight acceptance and only on moving to Eredivisie sides Utrecht and PSV did he truly establish himself as one to watch. So much for the Dutch agent, who once infamously dubbed him “a garden gnome” and said he would struggle to play in the sixth tier.

“I think that [my popularity with the public] is linked to my style of play,” he declared last autumn in an interview with the Belgian publication Sport/Foot

Magazine. “On the pitch I’m quick, I’m direct, I try things, I put in crosses. The fans can see that I don’t calculate.”

This season has been a mixed bag for Mertens. On a personal level he has often hit the heights, scoring half a dozen

Champions League goals and becoming the most productive marksman in Napoli history, an honour he now shares with Slovak midfielder Marek Hamsik on 121 goals. That he has surpassed Diego Maradona is some feather in his cap.

By way of contrast, Napoli were seen as title contenders at the start of the season but have been poor. Their hopes of a Champions League qualifying spot were hanging by a thread and the scars remain from November’s mutiny when the squad refused an order from club president Aurelio De Laurentiis to attend a punishment training retreat.

Mertens apparently was one of the

leading rebels and, like his team-mates, he was heavily fined by De Laurentiis, although their relationship seems to have improved somewhat.

Meanwhile, Internazionale and a number of Premier League outfits wait for their moment to pounce.