It was the third game of the Euros. There was a slow sense of familiarity returning. The night before, Italy had beaten Turkey 3-0 in Rome. Earlier in the afternoon, Wales and Switzerland had drawn 1-1 in Baku. In Copenhagen, Denmark would face Finland. Covid restrictions meant there would be only 13,700 at Parken. But a year after it should have been played, the fact Euro 2020 was going ahead at all was a symbol that, whatever the lingering effects of the virus, something approaching normal life could return.
Finland’s 3,000-strong contingent were giddy on the euphoria of playing in their first tournament; the Denmark fans were, like everybody, glad that football was possible again and that they were hosting a game at a major finals for the first time. The long days of lockdown were in the past.
The game wasn’t much but that didn’t really matter. In the early evening sunshine, it was happening, and that alone was worth celebrating. Then, two minutes before half-time, the ball went out of play on the Denmark left. The throw-in was taken, Christian Eriksen moved to collect and, as he did so, collapsed, pitching face first on to the ground, the ball bouncing away off his knee. It was apparent immediately that something was seriously wrong.
Simon Kjær, who was later praised by medics, was quickly to him, opening an airway and positioning him on his side. The referee, Anthony Taylor, reacted fast and summoned medical attention. Other players gathered round, forming a shield to offer some privacy as Eriksen received cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
Finland’s Joel Pohjanpalo stood some distance to the side, his head in his hands. The Denmark midfielder Thomas Delaney wiped tears from his eyes with his shirt. Jonas Wind was weeping, Martin Braithwaite praying. But what was most striking, the image that lingered, was the sense of banality; this ordinary corner of an ordinary field, bathed in sunshine and yet the stage for an awful drama. This was supposed to be about putting Covid behind us, yet death walked still among us. Et in arcadia ego.
In the agonising minutes that followed Eriksen’s collapse, any hint was seized upon. A photographer had seen him raise himself. A medic had apparently given a thumbs-up sign. But it was only an hour later that his agent, Martin Schoots, confirmed that Eriksen, who had suffered a cardiac arrest and been resuscitated with a defibrillator, was sitting up in his bed at the nearby Rigshospitalet and talking to his parents.
The game, having been suspended, was restarted two and a half hours after kick-off, something that remains a matter of controversy, with at least some players feeling they were pressured into continuing.
Mathias Jensen came on for Eriksen, Pierre-Emile Højbjerg missed a penalty, Pohjanpalo scored and Denmark lost 1-0. They lost their next game as well but, ultimately, finding a togetherness in adversity, achieved their best tournament finish since winning the Euros in 1992, reaching the semi-finals.
Eriksen, meanwhile, thanks to an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, was able to return. At the time, Serie A regulations prohibited the use of ICDs, which meant Eriksen leaving Internazionale. And that in turn created the beautiful circularity of him joining Brentford and, 259 days after his collapse, coming off the bench for Mathias Jensen in Brentford’s Premier League defeat by Newcastle.
On Sunday, three years on, Eriksen is again preparing for the start of a European Championship. He’s 32 now and has played in the World Cup since his cardiac arrest. Perhaps the meeting with Slovenia in Stuttgart will feel to him like just another game. But quite aside from the miracle that he is still alive, let alone that he has been able to continue his career, to anybody who witnessed events in Copenhagen that day it will come as a reminder of that moment when it seemed the last Euros, the festival of moving on, would be derailed.
There were at least a handful of people at that game who were also at Lusail 18 months later for the World Cup quarter-final between Argentina and the Netherlands when the journalist Grant Wahl died in the press box; he tweeted about Wout Weghorst’s late equaliser but did not live to see the penalties.
As we trooped down to the press conferences, there was a profound sense of futility: what did a few gruff words from Louis van Gaal matter now? This wasn’t like Eriksen; there was little sense of a duty to inform or explain, but we filed our pieces because what else was there to do? Somebody remembered Grant’s laptop, left open on the desk, and went back upstairs to pick it up; it is in the mundane details that tragedy lies.
The whole night had, anyway, been conditioned by questions of mortality and the very real possibility that it might be the last time we saw Lionel Messi, the greatest of our generation, playing on the greatest stage. It turned out that, for him, aged as he was, some work of noble note remained. Different people are stimulated by different artistic modes, but for those devoted to football, his pass to Nahuel Molina for the opening goal was of the most profound beauty, an affirmation of the greatest of which humanity is capable.
And that matters because, at least to the secular (and the religious perhaps see in such moments examples of divine glory), there is nothing else. It is such moments that can be held against the void, that offer a sense of meaning, that occlude, at least temporarily, the essential random determinants of existence. In the tawdry world of modern football, dominated by bullies and tyrants, the crooked and the avaricious, it is worth holding always to that. Glory comes in many forms but it is the pursuit of what the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker would call the hero-ideal that makes life worth living.
This is not a great Denmark side; if it were, it would not still be looking to Eriksen for creative inspiration. But his presence is a reminder of something beyond such mundane concerns, of how flimsy existence can be and what ought to be valued within it.
