Christian eager to face new-look Inter

Christian Eriksen cannot wait for our third successive Champions League campaign to begin as we head to the San Siro to meet an Inter side that will include a clutch of high-profile summer recruits.

The Nerazzurri finished fourth in Serie A last season to seal a return to European football’s top club competition for the first time since 2011/12 and have outlined their determination to build on that achievement by bringing in the likes of Radja Nainggolan, Stefan de Vrij, Lautaro Martinez, Šime Vrsaljko and Keita Baldé.

Christian is intrigued to see how well Luciano Spalletti’s signings are gelling together and how we match up to them in our Group B opener on Tuesday (5:55pm kick-off).

"They’re a very strong team - they’ve bought a lot of players,” said the 26-year-old. "They are mostly a new team so of course they need to get used to each other. But they have bought quality players and Inter has always historically been a big team. It will be fun to play against them, see how similar our standard is, and make our own history."

It is certainly a fixture that will stir memories for Spurs fans and Christian is acutely aware of our previous meetings with the Italian giants and Inter’s heritage in the competition.

"When I was younger I didn’t watch Italian football that much but that changed when they had that team with José Mourinho as manager and players like Wesley Sneijder," reminisces Christian. “When Inter were in the Champions League, there was a bit of extra focus on them and then, of course, there were the games against Spurs.

"You saw what happened last time Spurs played Inter and you know everything that happened with Gareth Bale - everybody remembers those games and how they went."

For those who don’t recall, the Nerazzurri were European champions when we met in the 2010/11 group stage and beat us 4-3 at the San Siro in our first-ever meeting - Bale scoring a hat-trick for us as we nearly pulled off an astonishing comeback with 10 men.

Inter did not heed the warning though and our Welsh flyer tormented them in the return, producing one of the competition’s all-time great performances as we won 3-1 thanks to goals from Rafael van der Vaart, Peter Crouch and Roman Pavlyuchenko.

We reached the quarter-finals that season, with last term’s round of 16 appearance the deepest we have gone in the competition since, and Christian is determined to push on again this time around.

"Everyone is looking forward to it," he said. "Going into the Champions League, we had a very good run last year and we need to do the same again. We’ve been there, had some achievements, and now we need to do that again to get even more success. It’s a very big start."