Gradually his teammates formed a circle around him, their backs to their stricken captain, suddenly not simply famous international footballers but young men witnessing an event that they knew was as profound and as horrifying as anything they had ever experienced.
ehind them lay Christian Eriksen, one of the finest players ever to set sail from Danish football, a bona fide star of the Premier League during his seven years at Tottenham Hotspur and a champion of Serie A this season with Inter Milan. As the cameras panned around the stands of the Parken Stadium in Copenhagen, it was dawning among the Danish and Finnish fans that this was far more serious than anything they had ever seen in their football lives too.
This was the second day of the delayed European Championship of 2020. This was Denmark against Finland, the first fixture of Group B. And this was the day that Christian Dannemann Eriksen from the western tip of the Danish island of Funen, aged 29 years old, almost lost his life on a football pitch.
By the end of the night he was in hospital and able to speak to his teammates over the phone. Little more than an hour after the Danish football union had confirmed Eriksen’s condition as stable, the teams retook the pitch. The dot matrix board went up to declare the substitution.
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Mathias Jensen formally replaced Eriksen. The clock began again on 41 minutes and in a day that felt anything but normal, a football match resumed. Finland won, through a 58th minute header by Bayer Leverkusen forward Joel Pohjanpalo
A little less than two hours earlier, Eriksen had stumbled and fallen to the turf out on the left wing. There were fewer than four minutes to play until half-time. It took little time to recognise that there was a serious medical emergency unfolding. It immediately became clear in the reaction of teammates and the English referee Anthony Taylor that Eriksen’s condition was of a different tenor. Even before the Danish medical teams had arrived, Eriksen’s teammates were clustered around him. Once the medics arrived, they soon began to perform a heart massage on the player. A silence fell over the half-full stadium.
By then, the television coverage had retreated from the scrutiny it would usually bring to bear on a player receiving treatment. The Finland players came back to the touchline by the coaching areas. Eventually the Denmark manager, Kasper Hjulmand, walked across the empty pitch to his players.
What he encountered on the far touchline were young men confronting the unthinkable. The old tropes of football — triumph, disaster, tragedy, glory — swept aside. This was a moment of profound horror for Eriksen’s family and his teammates, and it was happening in the full glare of prime time television.
A young woman suddenly pitchside in a Denmark shirt with Eriksen’s name upon it, sobbing. Two officials of the DFU on either side of her. This was Eriksen’s partner Sabrina Kvist Jensen, the mother of their two children.
She was comforted by the Denmark captain, Simon Kjaer, who had been with Eriksen seconds after his collapse and had moved him into the recovery position, and the goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel. The cameras withdrew. This was a different kind of day. Around Eriksen and the medical teams working upon him, others who had come on to assist held up white sheets to shield him.
In the stadium the crowd rallied, as at White Hart Lane they had once sung the name of Fabrice Muamba, a former Spurs player who had collapsed on the pitch with a cardiac arrest while playing for Bolton Wanderers in March 2012, aged just 23. Now at the Parken Stadium, as the Spurs crowd did with Muamba, they were urging Eriksen to keep going, to survive.
Eventually he was carried off, an oxygen mask over his mouth, his Praetorian guard of teammates forming a protective shield. The teams and officials had left the field, and the wait for news had begun.
A jolt like no other to the life of the game and the lives of those who play it, and those, too, who watch it and cherish it. The reminder of our mortality delivered in the most incongruous of settings, a brilliant young athlete on a warm day in his home country doing what he did best.
Who knows what life-changing events took place out there on the pitch for Eriksen himself, his family and those closest to him.
At 6.31pm UK time, the DFU announced that Eriksen was awake and undergoing further examinations at the nearby Rigshospitalet. In the Parken Stadium the Finnish and Danish fans chanted his name back and forth. The tournament would continue. For Eriksen, a supremely gifted player who has often carried the hopes of his national team, life may never again be the same.
He has 109 caps for his country, an array of individual awards and three famous clubs on his resume.
There are four league titles across two countries, some near misses in European finals and the status of the greatest Danish player of his generation. As with all leading footballers, we think we know a little of them - of their character, and their mettle - from hours spent observing them. We judge them accordingly, in a world where the terms are never more serious than victory or defeat. It is, after all, only football.
Now this, a moment when life came down to a basic question of survival and for those who saw it, a great clarity about what matters and what does not.