Bergkamp and Eriksen have remained close. And you wonder whether the older man sees something of his younger self in the prodigy he nurtured at Ajax. As Bergkamp puts it in his book Stillness and Speed: “There are some players who, as soon as the whistle went at the end of training… boom. They went inside, got changed, then straight in the car and away. But the real liefhebbers [lovers of the game] stayed behind to practise. At Arsenal it was always the same players, eight or nine, who stayed behind after training.”