Ryan Babel believed former team-mate Christian Eriksen would not be a success in the Premier League because he was \u201ctoo soft\u201d.<\/p>\n
Babel has just signed for Fulham on a deal until the end of the season\u00a0and played with the\u00a0Tottenham Hotspur midfielder at Ajax.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very sceptical in the beginning because we played together for a year at Ajax in 2012,\u201d Babel, whose new side play Spurs on Sunday, told The Sun.<\/p>\n
\u201cOf course Christian was amazing technically but, physically, he didn\u2019t want to be in challenges.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor him to go to England, I was sceptical about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut so far he has amazed me \u2014\u00a0he is an incredible player who is much stronger than he was before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eriksen won three Eredivisie titles with Ajax before moving to White Hart Lane for \u00a311.5million.<\/p>\n
The 26-year-old is now one of the top players in the Premier League and is being coveted by Real Madrid.<\/p>\n
Babel was signed by Liverpool for \u00a311million in 2007 when he was just 20, but his time on Merseyside was not a success and left in 2011 to join Hoffenheim amid accusations he had a poor attitude.<\/p>\n
Babel said: \u201cThere was nothing wrong with my attitude. I have never been a difficult person. I was always easy. I came in on time, I was always a professional.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was more that I wasn\u2019t always consistent in putting maximum work into training sessions. If you are young and you don\u2019t get rewarded with game time, or don\u2019t come into games, it is difficult to try to still be hungry in the training sessions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat is very normal if you are 20. That was, I guess, mostly the issue. I always went to try to speak to the manager a lot. I was young and did things besides football, such as being involved a little with music.<\/p>\n
\u201cThen they took that part way out of proportion, that I was being more busy with music than with football.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rafa Benitez fined him two weeks\u2019 wages in January 2010 for revealing on Twitter he had been dropped for a game with Stoke.<\/p>\n
A year later, Babel tweeted a picture of referee Howard Webb in a Manchester United kit after a 1-0 FA Cup defeat, with the caption: \u201cAnd they call him one of the best referees? That\u2019s a joke. SMH.\u201d<\/p>\n
That made him the first player to be\u00a0punished by the FA for a social media post \u2014 they fined him \u00a310,000 \u2014 and days later\u00a0Liverpool sold him.<\/p>\n
Babel, now 32, said: \u201cI posted it and after not even 30 minutes it was really all over \u2014 CNN, Sky Sports\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009I didn\u2019t expect that to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ryan Babel believed former team-mate Christian Eriksen would not be a success in the Premier League because he was \u201ctoo soft\u201d. Babel has just signed for Fulham on a deal until the end of the season\u00a0and played with the\u00a0Tottenham Hotspur midfielder at Ajax. \u201cI was very sceptical in the beginning because we played together for…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-football-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}