Christian worship

SPRING was breaking out in Copenhagen-onThames when Christian Eriksen’s football career resumed after his brief loan spell in heaven.

The thunderous cheer greeting the entry of

No.21 in red and white stripes after 52 minutes was a merciful distraction from Brentford’s freefall towards relegation.

Whatever your allegiance, whatever you thought of the game or the result, this was a curtain call for all of football to celebrate.

By his own admission, Eriksen had “died” for around four minutes after collapsing during Denmark’s Euro 2020 opener against Finland.

Thanks to swift medical intervention, he watched the last 20 minutes of it on TV from his hospital bed, less than a mile away from the Parken stadium.

Fast forward some eight months and Brentford’s huge relegation duel with Newcastle should have felt like the first day of the rest of his life.

But the Bees never gave Eriksen a chance to call the tune like a jukebox.

He was dealt a duff hand by Josh Dasilva’s red card after just 12 minutes for a ghastly challenge on Matt Targett.

When Joelinton’s fine header and Joe Willock’s sweeping finish worsened the Bees’ plight before the break, there was a danger Eriksen’s comeback would be confined to a ringside seat.

As it was, scrambling to help 10-man Brentford’s thankless exercise in damage limitation was hardly the welcome mat Bees boss Thomas Frank had planned for him.

But he did well enough, covering ground earnestly and staying on parade in front of the back four. Fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), a credit card-sized device which sends electrical pulses to regulate abnormal heart rhythms, he has been granted an encore in professional football few of us thought possible on June 12 last year.

In the matchday programme, Eriksen detailed his journey back to the Premier League from the afterlife waiting room.

“I remember it all – except those minutes when I was in heaven,” he said. “When I woke up from the CPR, it was like waking up from a dream.

“It wasn’t until I was in the ambulance that I realised I had been dead.”

The players agreed to complete the game – with at least one patient tuning in from the emergency room. “I could see Parken from my room and hear the cheers, or no cheers, from my hospital bed,” said Eriksen (above).

“They

‘‘

I remember it all – except for the minutes I was in heaven. It wasn’t until I was in the ambulance I realised I had been dead shouldn’t have gone back out and played, not after that trauma. But that wasn’t me – I had lost those minutes. I didn’t know what had happened, I didn’t realise what they had seen.”

Sadly for Eriksen and Brentford, another date with the grim reaper — the one guarding the trapdoor to the Championship — may yet be his fate.