After a fairytale return, Christian Eriksen looks to pen a happy ending for Brentford

Among the many elements of Brentford’s Danish connection is their commitment to producing stories that might just as easily have been written by Hans Christian Andersen.

At the turn of the year, it seemed unlikely that the most heart-warming chapter of this particular footballing fairytale was still to be written, and yet here we are.

On Saturday afternoon, Christian Eriksen is expected to step onto a football pitch in a competitive setting for the first time since he was carried off one, the world stunned and fearing for his life, more than eight months ago.

There have been so many people and circumstances to thank for the sequence of events that have led here, to west London, and a comeback that was a million miles from anyone’s thoughts on that shocking June day.

All the strands seem to have come together nicely — Eriksen back playing football in the Premier League at a fittingly likeable club under a Danish boss, Thomas Frank, who coached him as a teenager — but there is an urgency and trepidation to the whole scenario.

Not because of what Eriksen has been through, though there will be a nervousness watching him go up for his first header or be clattered in his first 50-50.

More because of what he now steps into, joining a side who are in a rut, having taken just one point from their last seven league games.

Coinciding with a series of unlikely revivals from seemingly-doomed rivals, it has seen the Bees dragged to the very precipice of a relegation scrap, four points above the drop, conceding games in hand to almost all of their rivals.

Goals have been hard to come by, not helped by Ivan Toney’s recent absence, but even at their best this season Frank’s men have lacked a certain spark, a link between the solid