BEGLIN: DANES GAVE US BIG LESSON

APART from Jan Molby’s shirt, Jim Beglin didn’t get much change out of the Danes while on Irish duty. In the 1986 World Cup qualifiers, Beglin (right) was on the Irish team which played Demark twice, and was on the receiving end each time, 3-0 in Copenhagen and 4-1 in Dublin. The first encounter was on November 14, 1984 – the same date as the second leg of this year’s play-off — and will always be special for the Waterford native as it was his World Cup bow, along with Mick McCarthy and Kevin Sheedy. On a personal level, the game went well as Beglin was chosen as Ireland’s Man of the Match, but when your team gets spanked, such awards are a touch hollow. ‘I got Jan Molby’s shirt afterwards and remember thinking how good they must be that Jan was only a substitute,’ he recalled. A year later, Beglin had 10 caps under his belt when he lined up in a strong Irish XI at Lansdowne Road. The team included Paul McGrath, Kevin Moran, Liam Brady, Frank Stapleton, Mark Lawrenson, Dave O’Leary, Tony Grealish and Sheedy. Arguably, it was as strong a side as any selected by Eoin Hand as manager yet they were blown away by a Danish team needing to win to secure their place in the finals. ‘There was always a feeling that we could get something from every game, especially at home,’ said Beglin. ‘They were simply much better than us and turned us over,’ he added. ‘They had Jan Molby, Soren Lerby, Michael Laudrup, Jesper Olsen and Preben Elkjaer going forward and Morten Olsen controlled things at the back.’ Ireland scored first through Stapleton but within a minute Elkjaer had equalised and the pendulum quickly swung. Lerby, who had made his Danish debut in the 3-3 draw against Ireland in 1978, was the playmaker-in-chief. He was held in such high esteem that his club, Bayern Munich, had a plane waiting to fly him back for a cup game against Bochum that evening. When Sivebaek made it 3-1 just before the hour, Lerby promptly left the field. Improbably, he made it back in time to figure as substitute for Bayern, becoming the

club’s first player to play two games in one day. By the time Elkjaer got his second goal and Denmark’s fourth in the 77th minute, a number of fans in a dismal attendance of 15,154 had seen enough. ‘We’d no complaints,’ said Beglin, who wasn’t allowed forget it. ‘Before the World Cup finals, Molby used to rub it in at training Melwood with a silly song about who was going to the World Cup. ‘They went to Mexico with a big reputation and hammered Uruguay 6-1. But they then played poorly in the last 16 and lost heavily to Spain.’