Christian Eriksen says it's time to move on from Tottenham's Wembley curse as the Bernabeu and Real Madrid loom

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“You need to find something else to write about,” said a grinning Christian Eriksen, as he greeted the assembled press in the Wembley tunnel.

Tottenham’s first league win at their new home. A win achieved without Harry Kane scoring. Yes, Eriksen was right. Time to change the script.

But then, this has always been one of the most impressive aspects of this Tottenham side: their ability to defy prevailing wisdom. There was a time, remember, when it was commonly believed Mauricio Pochettino teams were meant to collapse in April and May. When people were certain his viscerally intense management style would burn out after three seasons. When it seemed inevitable that the financial gravity of the Premier League would bring Tottenham crashing to earth. They can’t win at Wembley. They’re too reliant on Kane. Teams will work them out.

In a sense, Pochettino’s mission has been to take these million little anxieties - these airborne particles of negativity that for decades have followed Tottenham teams around like the weather - and replace them with something stronger, something positive, something unbreakable. Tottenham sit third in the Premier League without ever really getting going. The more you doubt them, the more they believe.

And so Pep Guardiola’s jibe that Tottenham were “the Harry Kane team” had, Eriksen claimed, barely provoked a murmur in the dressing room. “I’m not sure how it’s been said,” he drawled, “but everybody knows that you should take it with a ground of salt. If you have respect, you probably don’t say it. Maybe it was a joke. I don’t know.”

It was Eriksen’s left-footed goal that gave Tottenham a largely unremarkable 1-0 win over Bournemouth. With his feet, and later with his mouth, Eriksen thus succeeded in shutting down a debate that was never really a debate in the first place.

“If Harry doesn’t score, we have a strong enough team to score, whether it’s me, whether it’s Dele, whether it’s Sonny, whether it’s Trippsy or Moussa Sissoko,” he said. “Anyone who has the chance is good enough to finish.” For the record, Tottenham claimed 16 out of their 33 wins last season without Kane finding the scoresheet.

That relentless positivity will surely serve them well this week, when they face what may well be the most daunting fixture in club football right now: a trip to the Bernabeu to play Real Madrid in the Champions League. Real have won just one of their four home games in La Liga this season, and yet Valencia, Levante and Real Betis all succeeded by giving up possession, giving up territory, and trying to soak up pressure.

Can Tottenham really thrive by taking the game to Real Madrid? “We will try to dominate,” Pochettino responded. “We will try to be better, but it’s a massive challenge for us to dominate them. We will press high, try to play in the opposition’s half, try to be aggressive and brave. That’s how we feel football should be played.

“If they try to push us back deeper, then OK. We may have to adapt to their quality. But from the beginning, we will be brave and aggressive, and play to win the game. We do not change because we are playing in Madrid. It’s Real Madrid, and we respect them, but we go to play.”

You had to hand it to Pochettino, really. There was a simple, crystalline optimism to his insistence that Tottenham would go into the Bernabeu and try to duff up the 12-time European champions on their own turf. In reality, Tottenham will probably try and reproduce the template from their 3-1 win over Borussia Dortmund last month, a game where they enjoyed just 34 per cent possession but sprang to life on the counter-attack.

And yet in Pochettino’s universe, positive word is the mother of positive deed. No team ever beat Real Madrid without dreaming about it first.

“It’ll be a test to see how far we’ve really come,” Eriksen said. “In the last two seasons, we’ve definitely proved that we are a team that will have a nice, tough game at the Bernabeu.” And certainly there was no sense, from Eriksen or from Pochettino or from anyone else, that Tottenham will be overawed by the occasion. None of the players who experienced the 4-0 mauling by Real Madrid in 2011 are still at the club. This lot believe they belong.

“We’re building something special,” Eriksen explained. “I hope that’s what you see from the outside, and what we also feel. What will it take to beat Real Madrid? Quality and belief. We have both.”