IF ERIKSEN COVERAGE WAS A TURN-OFF, THEN TURN OFF

IF you believed you were watching a man die, in real time, on your television on Saturday evening, that is on you, not the BBC. You have a remote control.

It has an off switch, it contains the capacity to change channels. If you continued viewing, it was because you were compelled by events. That is understandable; so were we all. But it’s not the BBC’s fault if you now feel guilty.

Gary Lineker apologised on the corporation’s behalf because, well, everyone apologises now. Yet what he was apologising for is another matter.

The BBC were covering a football match and during it a relatable human tragedy occurred. Anybody who was watching at the time was immediately invested in this.

My wife, on the sofa next to me, was in tears. We have a son with pulmonary stenosis; two operations to open the valve before he was four months old; a valve replacement due some time in the coming years.

He’s 23 now. Still plays football twice a week. Once, when he was a kid, he took a ball into his chest during shooting practice, and fell face forward, just like Christian Eriksen. When I picked him up, his big eyes opened and he swallowed a giant gasp of air, like someone pulled from the deepest sleep.

To this day, we don’t know what happened. ‘Everyone is allowed one fainting episode and one fit,’ said his heart specialist, after all checks came back clear. ‘Two, and we start to worry.’

So Eriksen’s collapse felt close to home. And we stayed watching, as many did, out of hope, not ghoulish fascination. What were the BBC to do? Cut to the studio? When they did, the programme lasted five minutes because what was there to say?

And, suddenly, when a gardening programme was inserted where updates from the Parken Stadium had been, we turned to Sky Sports News because they would have the swiftest reports.

It was Robert, our 23-year- old, who sent us the social media photo of Eriksen being carried away, now revived. That was the story we wanted, the only story anyone wanted. The BBC should not be castigated for trying to cover it.