How one moment showed why Christian Eriksen has quietly become one of the Premier League's best

“Football is an art, like dancing is an art - but only when it's well done does it become an art.”

This may not necessarily be the best time to quote Arsene Wenger, but there remains inside the stubborn and stoic manager of Arsenal a fundamental belief in the way football should be played.

It will not help his position that his ideology fits best for players at Tottenham Hotspur right now, and one in particular, but as Wenger will no doubt testify, the game can be cruel.

You cannot imagine too many Tottenham fans can still turn to the actual evidence of Wednesday night’s Carabao Cup defeat to West Ham - a fast deletion of anything on Sky+ - but there, with 86 minutes and 26 seconds on the clock, was proof of the magic of Christian Eriksen, if any is still really needed.

It is not quite the iconic picture of Diego Maradona leading a form of line-dancing chaos with six Belgians in 1982 (and yes, evidence has subsequently shown us it was the breaking up of a defensive wall), but a freeze frame of a dramatic game told you much about the elegance of Eriksen’s game.

With a touch over three-and-a-half minutes to go, West Ham, who had produced a quite stunning fight-back in a game they looked beaten in, were fighting for their lives to hold onto a 3-2 lead that that even they, as captain Mark Noble later admitted, did not think was possible.

Often in these situations of a game, especially in the dying moments of a cup tie that had the added intensity of being a derby, the team chasing goes long. Perhaps to offset that Mauricio Pochettino brought on Eriksen, with nine minutes remaining, for Danny Rose.

His craft was untouched by the intensity of the occasion, to such an extent that when a ball was played to Juan Foyth on the Spurs right, he ghosted to the edge of the West Ham area, next to where it reaches the edge of the D. Eriksen has scored 55 times and assisted 55 goals in the last five seasons of playing for club and country. Logic suggests that even a tired defence would be aware of the colossal threat and West Ham certainly had the numbers.

In the final 22 yards of the Wembley turf towards their goal were 10 of their players. Five defenders plus goalkeeper Adrian were inside the West Ham penalty area while Aaron Cresswell, Manuel Lanzini, Noble and Andy Carroll were staged around its edge.

And yet in that moment of that game and with that dynamic, not one West Ham player was within, at best, eight yards of the Danish player. Noble (looking tired) and Ogbanna (his bodyweight wrong) were the nearest.

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All Foyth had to do was curb his youth enthusiasm and play an inside ball to Eriksen and one of the most dangerous players in English football would have been in, with space, to find an equaliser and you would have fancied his chances.

There is an art to finding that kind of room, an understated glory, in any kind of football, not least the breakneck pace of English football (the Carabao Cup tie felt like a Premier League by this stage). In the game’s closing stages it was all on Eriksen, and from 30 yards he almost scored. In those nine minutes he was Tottenham’s conductor.

“I like getting the ball,” he said in interview last year. “If you are smart enough, you don't need to run. I’m always going to be the guy sneaking the ball through, to create something.”

This has been his game from youth. Uffe Pedersen, the head of talent for OB in Odense, remembered: “He stepped up easily, this young guy taking over the whole game, setting the speed and shape of the game. Christian could play anywhere with good players.” That was before Ajax, where Frank de Boer coined a lovely phrase, that Eriksen had “eyes in his back”.

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He feels like a de facto ‘number 10,’ perhaps harking back to a Teddy Sheringham or a Peter Beardsley, or more recently a Dimitar Berbatov; players with soft feet and x-ray vision. Poets with a football, the kind of players who melt the hardest of souls.

In 143 Premier League appearances for Spurs Eriksen has scored 34 times and created 40 goals, a modern day one-in-two man. He rarely seems flustered or flattened. The game moves at his pace. Steve Davis said he was always thinking three shots ahead in a game of snooker, and great players know what comes before it arrives. The Spurs midfielder unquestionably has that.

The loss of Harry Kane for Tottenham’s trip to Old Trafford puts more on the Dane, but in the storm that is Premier League football, Eriksen remains a sea of calm.

He was linked to Juventus in 2015 and it has been said that Fc Barcelona have sent Robert Fernandez, their sporting director, to watch both Kane and Eriksen this season. They have tracked Eriksen, who is still just 25, since his days in the Eredivisie. There has been mention of a £250m price tag for Kane. There has similarly been wild estimations of the value of Dele Ali, the final part of Tottenham’s holy trinity, but an actual figure has yet to materialise for the Danish wonder.

No doubt at some point an astronomical offer will arrive, late, and without notice, which Eriksen, more than anyone, will understand perfectly.