Rasmus Hojlund forces a throw in down the Danish right in the 17th minute. Alexander Bah runs in and takes a quick throw, hurling it past Hojlund and into the feet of Jonas Wind inside the Slovenia box. Wind immediately backheels it quite brilliantly into the path of the onrushing Christian Eriksen. Having slipped into the box unnoticed, Eriksen has no one around him when he chests the pass down and slams it into the far bottom corner.
1-0 Denmark. Their goalscorer: Christian Eriksen.
We don't really think about it too much these days. He's been playing regularly these past couple of years hasn't he, this Christian Eriksen? For Manchester United, for Brentford, for Denmark at the World Cup. When you switch on the telly, he's there, like he always is, isn't he? So, when Demark stepped out onto the pristine Stuttgart Arena pitch for their Euro 2024 opener, he was right there. Of course he was.
Of course?
It's an anecdote almost now, an 'oh, look how beautiful football is' moment, a story... but it's easy for us to forget just how close we were to never seeing Eriksen again. Three years ago (1,100 days to be exact) and 900 km away via the A7 motorway, in Copenhagen's Parken stadium, he had been playing in Denmark's opening game of Euro 2020 when he suddenly collapsed. For 13 minutes he lay on the pitch, his teammates standing guard, shielding him from prying eyes as medical staff attended to him. Team doctor Morten Boesen would tell the Athletic later that "he [Eriksen] was gone. And we did cardiac resuscitation. It was a cardiac arrest. How close were we? I don't know."
He was gone. Now, he is here.
Of course.
Every bit of that journey -- from having Simon Kjaer sprint over to clear his airways to him walking onto the pitch in Stuttgart -- has been as remarkable a miracle as the sporting world has ever seen. And it's one worthy of great celebration.
What makes it all the more remarkable is just how he's gone about proving that he still is the player he was before that dark moment. Back then, in the ambulance on the way to hospital, Eriksen had told paramedics to keep his boots. "I won't need them again." On Sunday, he had those boots on, and he absolutely dominated. Wearing #10, flitting in between spaces like only he among the 20 outfielders on the pitch could, Eriksen bossed Slovenia around for large swathes of the opener. It was a masterclass in old school playmaking: the trequartista given license to roam and create and take chances. That goal in the 17th minute was just the icing on the cake.
🥵 Jonas Wind with the flick for Eriksen...@Alipay | #EUROskills pic.twitter.com/sc6gOBU0B2
- UEFA EURO 2024 (@EURO2024) June 16, 2024
Two years ago, before his first game following that cardiac arrest, he'd said, "I felt from the beginning of this that I need to prove that you can play with an ICD, if something that bad has happened. You can return to normal life afterwards. That is more motivation for me, to show I am capable of that."
He'd already shown it by becoming a regular in the Premier League (after the Serie A didn't allow him to play due to his implanted defibrillator), but there was something deeply poetic about what happened on Sunday. For him to return to the scene of the darkest moment of his life and show everyone that miracles are indeed real, to show that he remained the genius playmaker he had been... just incredible.
In Denmark's opener of Euro 2020, Eriksen had received the 'Man of the match' award as a show of support and love and prayer. In their 2024 opener, he got the MOTM again, and he got it for being the undisputed best player on the pitch. Of course he was.
And for that, for the goal, for being the absolute inspiration that he is, Christian Eriksen takes our Moment of the Day from day 3 of Euro 2024.