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BEfore Wales training session on a hot morning at the Giulio Onesti complex in Rome, Ben Davies pulls a guarded pad in the shadows and speaks for hours on end as he learns of his close friend and former Tottenham teammate Christian Eriksen’s cardiac arrest.
It was pretty awful, he says. He’s a good friend, and I didn’t know what happened. I was on the phone with quite a few of our mutual friends, it was a bit of a worry and panic phase at the time. Thank God, everything seems to be fine and He is healthy and happy.
Eriksen was separated From Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen last week after a successful operation to fit a defibrillator implant. The Internazionale midfielder spent seven years in Tottenham, six of them alongside Davies. Until the news of Eriksen returned home after his visit to the Danish team at the training base, it was reflected in uncertainty.
I’ve talked to him a few times since then, Davies says. He seems to be in a good mood. I don’t know what will happen to him from now on, but at best, we just give him privacy, we let him spend time with his family and most importantly, he’s still alive.
On Saturday, Wales and Denmark will go the extra mile over the past 16 years European Championship Johan Cruyff at the Arena in Amsterdam, Ajax’s home, Eriksens ’first professional club and which he left for Spurs in 2013. Davies, meanwhile, lived in Denmark as a boy when his father Alun went there to work and spent two years in Viborg. We had great times there as a family, Defender says.
There are a few familiar faces Denmark Team Pierre-Emile Hjbjerg is Davies ’second Spurs teammate, but Eriksens’ absence is a reminder of the game’s bigger picture. The football side when it happened [in Copenhagen] it became completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is that he is alive and he is there for his family.
Davies acknowledges the spirit that Denmark has shown in reaching this point because of the distressing scenes in Copenhagen. It has to be incredibly difficult for them, he says. Play the same way they did after the incident happened, and continue, it will definitely encourage you. They deserve a lot of recognition for standing and performing the same way they have.
Wales will fly from Amsterdam to Rome on Thursday, deciding to return to Cardiff as originally planned before the tournament. In the playoffs for the second time in five years after landing from country A to the goal difference, the opportunity to reconcile their success at Euro 2016 when they reached the semifinals doesn’t suddenly seem insurmountable.
Leaving the group was a big challenge, says Swiss, Turkish and Italian Davies they lost on Sunday. A lot of people wrote us off and to rank second and show the resilience we did, it hasn’t really sunk into how great an achievement it was yet. We must now begin to enjoy it. Here we enjoy it.
We built the expectation we expected for ourselves to leave the group, we built that pressure for ourselves to get out of the group first and now the pressure is gone. Now it’s about how far we can go, and we really believe we can go ahead and create something special.
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Monday afternoon Wales the team enjoyed an open bus tour of Rome but will focus on winning Denmark. Davies, for example, has been warned. I talked to him [Eriksen] last night [Denmark-Russia] game and he said it’s good to be tough, he says, smiling.
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