This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.\

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They say that professional Sportspeople die twice, the first time being when they retire. In this, as in so many other aspects of his game, the Danish footballer Christian Erikson is ahead of his peers.

Fifteen months ago, in his own words, he “was gone from this world for five minutes”, hovering in the borderlands between life and death. Now he is the centrepiece of a resurgent Manchester United team and almost certainly heading to his third World Cup in November. It was during a match between Denmark and Finland in June 2021 that Eriksen collapsed after suffering cardiac arrest, and his team mates formed a protective circle around his prostrate body as the paramedics worked to save him.

Eriksen wasn’t just any player. He was — ironically — the heartbeat of the side, the primus inter pares, the one spoken of in the same breath as the great Laudrup brothers. But he was also, in the words of Danish journalist Troels Henriksen, “one of us … the essence of normality. The average boy next door with a talent for football that was far from average.”

Eriksen wasn’t just any player. He was — ironically — the heartbeat of the side

The question as Eriksen was taken to hospital that day was not whether he would ever play again: it was whether he’d survive. But when the doctors said he could resume his career, he began to plan his comeback. Inter Milan, his club at the time, had to let him go: he had been fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD), which under Italian law precluded him from all professional sport.

Before Inter he had been at Spurs, and before that at Ajax: an elite player at elite clubs. But it was the distinctly un-elite Brentford who came in for him: a small club back in the top flight of English football for the first time since 1947. On his debut the entire crowd, many of them moist-eyed, rose to applaud him. The following week he and Norwich’s Brandon Williams tussled on the floor while challenging for the ball. An incensed Williams reared up, realised who he was grappling with, and hugged him.

But there was more to Eriksen’s return than sentiment, no matter how sincerely held. Put simply, he made Brentford better. Much better. In the ten games before his debut, they’d scored four points out of a possible 30: in the ten games after it they scored 22. “He sets a certain standard for himself and the team,” said striker Ivan Toney, “and we have to come up to that, to play above that.” “You can always give it to Christian and he will find a solution,” added manager Thomas Frank. And he did all this without ever acting the superstar. Off the pitch as well as on it, he was humble and understated, just as he has always been: values instilled in him by his parents and cherished ever since.

He could have stayed at Brentford, but Manchester United came knocking: and even if they are not the force of nature they once were, they are still one of the great clubs in world football. Not that you would have known it from their start to this season. They lost their first two matches: the second of them 4-0 to, of all teams, Brentford, with Eriksen playing out of position and all at sea. There were plenty of grim jokes about how his journey from death’s door to Old Trafford was proof that things can always get worse.

But since a thrilling if unlikely victory over their old foes Liverpool, both Eriksen’s and United’s stars have been in the ascendant. Journalist Carl Anka, referring to United manager Erik Ten Hag’s habit of buying himself time when answering a question by saying “it’s clear” (from the Dutch phrase “duidelijk”), has described Eriksen as “Ten Hag’s duidelijk safety net made flesh. He provides extra thinking time for all the United players around him.”

Both Eriksen’s and United’s stars have been in the ascendant

Much is understandably made of goals and assists, and in his days at Spurs Eriksen contributed plenty of both, but perhaps his greatest quality is the pre-assist: the pass before the pass before the goal, the switch of play from one flank to the other, the ball between the lines, the scalpel which cuts teams open.

At United he wears 14, a number which will always be associated with Johan Cruyff. It’s fitting that both men first made their names at Ajax, and though Eriksen is not on the same level as Cruyff — who is? — Cruyff was a big fan of his (“he’s a player I really like with all my heart”) and Eriksen resembles the master in his use of space.

This is, of course, space in four dimensions rather than three: space which is compressed, stretched and warped by the thin slivers of time in which gaps open and close, opportunities arise and vanish, goals are created or aborted. It is football as tesseract, and Eriksen is very, very good at it. He fulfils in every way Cruyff’s mantra for football and life alike. “You need to look, you need to think, you need to move, you need to find space, you need to help others.”

In times past there was a roaring trade in removing corpses in order to sell them on to medical schools, and someone involved in this grisly business would find themselves saddled with a two-word epithet. Now a man both ordinary and extraordinary has reclaimed that moniker and made it mean something uplifting, even wondrous. Christian Eriksen: resurrection man.