In 1992, Denmark did something that should have been impossible already because the team didn’t even make it out of the qualifying group for the European Championships.
European Football Championships on channels 14.6.–14.7. Go to the competition website from this link. Quarter-final Germany-Denmark on Saturday evening at 10 pm on TV2 and Areena.
Captain of the Danish national football team Lars Olsen recalled the most special episode of his life to the signatory in 2016. Since then, Olsen, who has worked as the head coach of the Faroe Islands for a long time, had played for Trabzonspor in the Turkish league until the end of his contract, packed his modest moving load and jumped behind the wheel of the car. It was late spring 1992.
From Trabzon to the northern German port city of Puttgarden is a drive of almost 4,000 kilometers, during which Olsen had hardly thought about the European Championship that will start soon in Sweden. They had remained a bitter dream for Denmark, when the team had lost in Copenhagen to Yugoslavia – a disunited federal state whose war of disintegration escalated into a terrible massacre in 1992.
Tired of the drive in Puttgarden, the athlete got out of the car to wait for the ferry to Själland and looked for Danish radio on the car radio, whose broadcasts are well received in northern Germany. That’s where the news came from, a confirmation of vague speculations that neither Olsen nor the other players who started their vacation in Denmark had counted on.
– It was reported on the radio that Yugoslavia had been excluded from the European Championships and we would play instead.
A critical review
Olsen said with a laugh that after that he went to the toilet in the terminal building, where he critically examined his waistline.
In later times, it has been canonized as truth that the Danish players, who had accumulated a few kilos of holiday mass, were then scraped together along the boys’ holiday paradises from the hammocks. It wasn’t the whole truth: the Danish federation had arranged a match against the short-lived successor of the Soviet Union, the CIS team that made it to the European Championships, on June 3.
Now it just so happened that after the match Denmark’s best players didn’t start their summer vacation, but a short and intensive EC camp. Denmark played its EC opening game in Malmö already eight days after the CIS match.
The megastar refused
Although the starting points were apparently not on Denmark’s side, the matter requires examination. The player base was excellent, even with a controversial head coach by Richard Möller-Nielsen superstar who feuded with Michael Laudrup did not agree to participate.
Denmark was allowed to play its two group matches in Malmö, i.e. almost at home. No one burdened the emergency team with any kind of pressure. The eight-team EC tournament at that time was a fast crunch, where even a short flow state carried.
Möller-Nielsen analyzed the situation and made relaxation a virtue. In the final match of the preliminary group against France, Denmark was a goal away from the next place when the head coach ordered a striker by Lars Elstrup to the field. This is how he remembered the situation for me later:
– I asked Richard what he wants me to do. He looked at me for a moment and answered: Lars, we need a goal, and you are the striker. What do you think I want you to do?
Elstrup scored the deciding goal.
When France had fallen, the semi-final win over Holland and the final win over Germany was already a sweet logic: this is how it was supposed to go.
In Sweden, 32 years ago, something was experienced that should not have been possible either way. In a way, though, it was.