Wales defender Ben Davies has revealed that he and his former team-mate Christian Eriksen have already spoken twice and joked about their teams’ last-16 clash in Amsterdam on Saturday.

Eriksen has informed his former Tottenham team-mate he will be ‘in for a tough one’.

Davies and Eriksen were together for six years at Spurs and became good friends, making the horror of the player’s collapse for Denmark against Finland particularly distressing for the Wales defender. 

That they are in regular phone contact appears to underline what good progress he is making.

‘He seems to be in good spirits,’ Davies said. ‘I don’t know what happens with him from here on out. I think it’s best we just let him have his privacy, let him spend time with his family and the most important thing is he’s still alive. The football side of it — once that happens — is completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is he is alive and there for his family.’

Denmark midfielder Christian Eriksen is continuing his recovery from his cardiac arrest 

As Eriksen continues his recuperation, the enormity of what he and his team-mates went through in the Parken Stadium 11 days ago has made them the neutrals’ favourite side in this tournament. That was precisely the kind of status Wales basked in themselves, as they reached the finals in France five years ago.

‘Denmark is celebrated throughout Europe: it deserves this more than anyone else,’ stated the banner headline in Tuesday’s Politiken newspaper in Copenhagen, reflecting views from Moscow, Oslo and London after Denmark progressed to face Wales.

On Saturday, there is an added emotional component. The match will be played at Ajax’s Johan Cruyff Arena, where Eriksen spent the first three years of his career.

It is going to be yet another hugely challenging environment for a Wales side who have already played in front of large opposition following in Baku and Rome, with barely any of their own support.

Around 4,000 Danish fans are expected to travel to watch the side, after a director of Denmark’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said on Tuesday that fans from the country could travel without quarantining if they stayed in the Netherlands for less than 12 hours. 

Local fans’ support for Denmark, a country Holland is culturally close to, could mean the stadium being near its 16,000 Euros capacity.

On Monday, Wales’ health minister Eluned Morgan said police in Amsterdam would not be letting Welsh fans into the country. ‘We’ve drawn the short straw,’ Davies grinned. 

His own connection to Denmark comes from two years living there from the age of eight, when his father worked for a pump manufacturer near the city of Viborg.

Wales are clearly inspired by the fact that they have proved those wrong who wrote off their chances of getting beyond the group stage before the tournament had even started. Both Davies and Joe Rodon referenced this on Tuesday. 

‘A lot of people wrote us off at that stage and to finish second and show the resilience we did, it has not really sunk in how big an achievement that was yet,’ Davies added. 

‘For us now, we have to start relishing it. This is where we enjoy it. We built that expectation — we expected ourselves to get out of the group, we built that pressure on ourselves to get out of the group first and now, for us, the pressure is off.

‘We have kind of surpassed that pressure stage of getting out of the group. Now it is about seeing how far we can go and we really believe we can go on and create something special.’