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Euro 2021: Where European Football Meets Humanity:

This was “the Beautiful Game” at its best — and at it most harrowing. The highlights so far: The Man, The Goal and the Game.

By Hamish AlexanderPublished 3 years ago 8 min read
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@ChrisEriksen8 on Twitter.

Who knew. As of writing, Europe’s top soccer forwards have missed five of nine penalty kicks; the referring has been scandal free; VAR video review has yet to provoke any international incidents; and there was brilliant sunshine in Glasgow and pouring rain in London as Scotland (23rd in the world rankings) faced the Auld enemy England (4th in the world) in their own lair, and escaped with a 0-0 stalemate.

The Euro 2020 European soccer championships — so named for marketing reasons, even though it’s 2021 — have been surprisingly entertaining and, so far anyway, oddly competitive, with no clear favorite emerging from the 24 teams. Yet.

UEFA Euro 2020 is celebrating 60 years as a tournament across 11 host countries, the first time this has happened since the old Soviet Union beat the former Yugoslavia 2-1 on July 10, 1960. Nikita Khrushchev — remember him? — was the First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the time, and all-around fun guy Josip Broz Tito was President of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia

Fifty-one matches in all will be played by the time these European championships end on July 11. That’s an awful lot of soccer, no matter which way you cut it. The real surprise is that, unlike so many international soccer tournaments, these ones have been rip-roaringly entertaining so far.

There have been more than a few talking points, as to be expected, and one moment in time that showed the international game in its best light, and its most worrying, for what might have happened as much as for what did happen.

On this day then, roughly at the midway point of European soccer’s biggest coming-out party, now is as good a time as any to recognize and honor three of the biggest talking points: the Man, the Goal and the Game.

THE MAN

For a moment there the Beautiful Game was both beautiful and harrowing. Everyone watching Denmark play Sweden in the opening round of the European UEFA soccer championships — both on TV and live in person at Copenhagen’s Tella Parken national stadium — realized the moment Denmark’s Christian Eriksen collapsed, four minutes before half-time, that this was serious.

This was no play-acting, of the kind for which international soccer has become both famous and infamous.

For a moment there, it was possible to believe that Eriksen, unconscious and twitching uncontrollably, would not survive. Medical teams applied CPR not once but several times. Stricken, players from both sides surrounded Eriksen, shielding him from the prying TV cameras and the fans looking on in stunned silence, some covering their faces in shock, some looking down uncomfortably, all in some degree of distress.

We know now that Eriksen, age 29 and the very picture of health and clean living, suffered sudden heart failure and was out cold before he hit the ground.

We know now that Eriksen survived, thanks to the timely intervention of on-field medical teams, that Copenhagen’s 16-story Rigshospitalet teaching hospital is just five minutes away from the national stadium, that Eriksen today is healthy, talking and on the mend. Just the other day he surprised his Denmark teammates with a visit in the middle of a training session.

Few of us, though, looking on that night will ever forget the sight of Eriksen’s teammate and close personal friend, Denmark goalkeeper and team captain Kasper Schmeichel, wrapping his arms around Sabrina Kvist Jensen, Eriksen’s partner and the mother of their two young children, consoling a young woman who, for a brief moment there, was inconsolable. Nearly everyone watching expected the worst and, while it’s not easy to admit this, they — we — could be forgiven for it.

We now know that this will not be the moment for which the Euro 2020 tournament will be remembered. Thankfully.

Writing this, just 10 days later, it’s possible to think Euro 2020 will be remembered for the reason all big-league sporting events are remembered: who won, who lost, and the quality of play in reaching that moment.

That moment, though, put sport into its proper perspective.

We must not underestimate what this game meant to the wider world: a chance to see fans in a stadium, to once again feel the thrill of fans cheering tournament competition in person after 18 months of lockdowns, that welcome feeling that life, perhaps, maybe, just possibly might be about to return to normal.

For Eriksen and for the rest of us — and don’t doubt for a moment that Eriksen came as near death as it’s possible to be — was a reminder that life is both fragile and precious. That’s bigger than any sport. As one Danish newspaper put it, “Denmark lost. But life won.”

@ChrisEricken8 on Twitter

THE GOAL

Holy Schick!

Hardly anyone who knows anything about the Beautiful Game could have predicted that one of the greatest goals ever scored at a European Championship would come in a seemingly dour early-round contest between host Scotland — who know a thing or two about dour — and the Czech Republic.

Patrik Schick, 25, who plays his club soccer for Bayer Leverkusen in the German Bundesliga, scored what the Brits call “a worldly.” Schick’s moment of inspiration came e more than five minutes after halftime, having already scored in the first half to put the Czech Republic ahead 1-0 at Glasgow’s Hampden Park.

Scotland goalkeeper David Marshall was playing well upfield with the ball deep in the Czech half. He can’t be blamed for this. This is the modern game, in which the keeper is expected to be as much of an outfield player as the last man back — the “sweeper keeper,” as it were, a position demanded, honed and perfected by one-time Barcelona master tactician and present-day two-time Premier League champion (as manager of Manchester City) Pep Guardiola.

Schick, hovering around the left-side touchline and just barely inside the opposition half, saw Marshall off his line and gave the ball an almighty thwack. As a speechless crowd looked on — the TV commentator for UEFA’s host broadcaster simply screamed a single, unintelligible shriek at the top of his lungs — the ball bent through the air, well wide of Marshall’s right goalpost and then suddenly, unexpectedly curved inside the post and under the crossbar as Marshall, not exactly slow, tried his best impression of Usain Bolt. In the end, he didn’t even come close. The ball cracked the net without even bouncing and Schick knew in an instant that he had scored one of the mist remarkable goals in the history of the game.

In the end, his strike was measured at 49.7 yards. Think about that. Fifty yards, give or take a couple of feet, without bouncing, just bending and curving through the Scottish air like a pre-programmed heat-seeking missile.

“If that isn’t the goal of the tournament,” the TV commentator shrieked, once — along with everyone else — he had collected his wits, “I can’t wait to see the one that is!”

Meanwhile, the Scots were left once again to rue what might have been. It was ever thus. We live in the world, and the world does not favor Scotland at these kinds of tournaments. “The image of Marshall leaping helplessly as Schick celebrated,” one UK newspaper writer noted in The Guardian, “will inevitably feature in an already lengthy list of Scottish tournament calamities.”

No doubt.

THE GAME

Check the jokes about Hungary being hungry for more. This was no laughing matter.

A game that once again must have seemed like a wash on paper — host side Hungary, 37th in the world rankings, against tournament favorite and defending World Cup champion France, ranked 2nd — instead turned out to be arguably the most exciting game of the European championships so far.

Yes, a final score of 1-1 might look to the unpracticed eye like a damp squib, as the English say — though no more of a damp squib than England’s own 0-0 draw a day earlier against the Auld enemy Scotland.

That doesn’t take into consideration that the game was played before a wild and crazy, near sold-out crowd at Puskas Aréna in Budapest, seating capacity 67,215. (Crowd estimates put the final tally at 61,000.)

Budapest is the only one of the 11 host cities to allow full-capacity crowds, you see, and that makes a marked difference to the, erm, “viewing experience.” Hungary is one of only three countries — Azerbaijan and Russia are the others — to allow visiting fans to enter the country without quarantining.

The temperature was 33°C (91.5°F in New World money) on the ground, but that was nothing compared to the caged heat of a stadium that seemed to be home to half of Budapest — to hell with Covid! — and the noise when the aptly named Attila Fiola scored the opening goal one minute and 10 seconds into first-half stoppage time threatened for a moment there to knock out an entire bank of on-field microphones.

Barcelona forward Antoine Griezmann scored his 38th international goal to tie the game little more than an hour in, and more than 50,000 home supporters in the stadium — and countless other Hungarian supporters watching on TV — howled in indignation.

A loud crowd doesn’t a classic make, but the plain truth of the matter is this was a contest at the high end of the entertainment scale, with both sides going at it hammer and tong.

Soccer detractors who grouse about the game being boring and low-scoring as a spectator sport clearly haven’t seen a contest like this — certainly not one in which the captain of the home team had to be substituted just 26 minutes into the game because, and I quote directly from the statement issued by the Hungary Football Association: “He got a blow to his head which made him dizzy.”

If this wasn’t the game of the tournament — ouch, my brain (still) hurts — I can’t wait to see what is.

football
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About the Creator

Hamish Alexander

Earth community. Visual storyteller. Digital nomad. Natural history + current events. Raconteur. Cultural anthropology.

I hope that somewhere in here I will talk about a creator who will intrigue + inspire you.

Twitter: @HamishAlexande6

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