There are certain footballers of whom it is often said that you cannot take your eyes off them when they are playing. Lionel Messi, obviously. Cristiano Ronaldo, a hulking dreadnought of athletic grace and coiled sexual power. Zinedine Zidane was so arresting they made an entire film following his every move on the pitch. Into this same category, if for slightly different reasons, I would like to submit the luckless and yet weirdly alluring Vincent Janssen: Tottenham’s ghost of Christmas present.

Six months and 22 games into his Spurs career, the Dutch striker has scored just three goals: two in the League Cup, none from open play. These days, he is largely confined to fleeting substitute appearances in which he zips around for a few minutes at a time whilst doing - despite his best intentions - very little.

I once read an interview with Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien about the group’s transition to electronica around the turn of the century. The Kid A and Amnesiac albums feature scarcely a guitar between them, and so, as O’Brien put it, he was forced to learn “how to participate in a song without playing a note”. Watching Janssen at the moment is a similarly paradoxical experience: a player there but not there, desperate and yet almost entirely peripheral. If Zidane is Matthew Bourne’s Sleeping Beauty, all perfect curves and whirling dervishes, then Janssen is the plastic bag in American Beauty: an ephemeral but curiously spellbinding figure who comes with his own haunting piano score.