Denmark seal World Cup spot in style despite Eriksen collapse never being far from teammates’ thoughts
Four months and two days ago, the finest Danish footballer of his generation collapsed on the pitch in the European championship opener at Copenhagen’s Parken Stadium.
“He was gone,” the team doctor later said of the moment he felt for Christian Eriksen’s heartbeat and immediately set about vital emergency procedures. Colleagues had already helped save Eriksen’s life. Simon Kjaer, the Denmark captain, administered the preliminary CPR that would coax Eriksen back to consciousness before reaching the hospital.
He and Kjaer were speaking the next day, and still do so regularly, as close friends and near neighbours. Kjaer plays for AC Milan, Eriksen is under contract at Inter Milan.
Those who helped save the life of Eriksen, men such as central defender Kjaer and the Denmark goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel, have in the period since been performing impeccable feats for a national team that soars and soars, even without their recovering superstar.
Kjaer and Schmeichel are part of a defence that has become almost peerless. Nobody has scored against Denmark for approaching eight hours of competitive action. No team in 12 hours of World Cup qualifying has managed a goal against the Danes, which is part why they became second to Germany in qualifying for the 2022 finals.
A fourth goal of the campaign for Joakim Maehle against Austria on Tuesday night made Denmark uncatchable at the top of Group F in Europe.
Maelhe, a wing-back, is now the joint leading Danish marksman for the qualifiers. It’s a measure of the shared responsibility that 16 different players have contributed goals. A glance back to their road to Russia 2018, makes for a poignant comparison.
In those qualifiers, Eriksen scored 11 times in 11 matches, and set up four more goals. But the Danes of 2017 still needed a play-off to reach the finals, against Ireland, winning it 5-1 in the second leg with Eriksen registering a hat-trick.
“There’s maybe a day, sometimes two, when I don’t think about what happened [when Eriksen collapsed], but no more than that,” Kjaer told Bild-Zeitung this week. “The period after the incident was tough for us as a team.”
Denmark showed extraordinary resilience in the days after Eriksen’s collapse. After news reached shaken teammates that he was stable in hospital, they were obliged to play out the remaining 47 minutes of the match against Finland. They lost 1-0.
They were then defeated in their second Euro 2020 group game, against Belgium. But from that point, Denmark built up an extraordinary momentum, putting four goals each past Russia and Wales, and reached the semi-finals by beating the Czech Republic.
Only an extra-time defeat to England at Wembley kept them from the final. “We reached the semi-final but I wanted more,” Kjaer said after Denmark secured their early spot at next year’s finals. “We all want more.”
They would love to have Eriksen alongside them, as their lodestar again, but he has several rounds of medical assessment ahead to establish whether he might be safe to play.
He was fitted with a cardiac defibrillator, and under Italian league rules that would prevent him playing for Inter, though other leagues do not impose the same rules. “The only thing that matters is that Christian is well,” Kjaer said. “Anything else is secondary.”