As a famous manager once famously noted after a famously narrow squeak: football, bloody hell. Whatever we might think about footie, it does sometimes manage to transcend its apparent role as the circus part of bread and circuses and resolves itself into theatre and occasionally, beyond that into pure drama. Many football fans will have thought at one time or another that their team will be the death of them. This is certainly true of England. And yet, we are all still alive.

For many this/last year’s competition has offered a welcome reminder of something at least quasi-normal. At least a bit more about unity than isolation or dismal covid stats, and at least a drama of a safer, more familiar stripe. Or so we thought. The confusingly-titled 2020 Euros, however, offered a rather more realistic take on that idea, and one that produced a variety of reactions, all bound together by the singular intensity of witnessing a player drop dead on the pitch before our incredulous eyes, with not even free kick.

Despite the ubiquity of the internet, so seemingly removed from death are we in the first world that the prospect of being exposed to it, even after a year or more of a global pandemic for heaven’s sake, is intolerable and unacceptable. Even though we will all end up wearing the wooden pyjamas, so sanitised and divorced from nature and our own existences have we become that live footage of the unfolding drama in Copenhagen was a source of much public complaint and snivelling corporate apologising. Within minutes the BBC, God bless it, had cut to a gardening programme. Gardening! This was no time for tomatoes and water features. As we know, it all turned out far better than everyone feared but it was a moment of profound reality for an hour or two. I might not be writing this had he actually died.

We all have our legitimate perspectives on death but it remains one of the few taboos and so for it to be rude enough to gate-crash a football match during a pandemic, well… But you could say that its unannounced appearance prompted a larger healing than that which was administered to Christian Eriksen. An instantaneous sense of unity seemed to sweep over those present, those presenting and those watching, in which the petty differences of nationality and all the things that people are currently jumping up and down about evaporated and we were reminded of the real Score.

An invisible cloud of tangible empathy – love even – was apparent in the moment: the protective wall his team-mates made around him, the eerie reverence of a large crowd gone silent in the realisation of what was happening and the intensity of focus, of secular prayer, that he should not die. Eriksen came back with a single defib and the rest of us got a shot in the arm of something more immediately meaningful than anything Pfizer has come up with.

That Pfuzzy feeling continued for days, even as he recovered and indeed, it has cast the entire championship in a softer light and infused it with a strange beauty, reframing what is usually a preening cat walk of ego-froth into something less pompous and more about the collective than the individual. And it has been all the better for it. Indeed, aside from der preenmeister, Cristiano Ronaldo – he of the $1.6m per Instagram post who can take down Coca Cola’s share price with a flick of his wrist – where are the the overpaid, stay-puft superheroes of the kind that were on display only a few years ago? Are we possibly witnessing the timely demise of the permed football legend as inflatable marketing demigod?

Will football itself deflate back into some kind of proper proportion, something less hysterical and more spherical? Perhaps the shameful nonsense that is the Qatar 2022 World Cup will finally puncture the tolerance of the many. I doubt it, but you never know. Meanwhile, on the pitch, my own list of recommendations to improve the game would include: a camera inside the ball; the referee’s microphone made audible and, most of all, one player on each side on horseback.

If nothing else, the pandemic has lightly sifted that which is important from that which is not, despite all attempts of those with a vested interest to persuade us otherwise. Clearly it was an awful moment in Copenhagen, but much sweetness has come of it. In a time when so many people have had to die alone or been unable to find closure on the death of those they love, Christian Eriksen’s very close call offered a vicarious moment of release, of pain and then joyful relief and permission to express whatever other emotions have been fermenting in the last however long it’s been. Somehow, and despite itself, it all felt fairly right.

Whatever their dark police procedurals would have us believe, Denmark rejoices in its status as the happiest country in the world and now, as a direct consequence of the Eriksen affair, claim to be everyone’s second team. This is all well and good and we only wish Christian and the rest of them all the best going forward. Apart, that is, from the semi-final against England this Wednesday, when their going forward, either during the game or after it, is simply not an acceptable option. We have our own healing to do here thank you very much. Don’t get me started on that.

For now, any comments to either the Ascending Arc or my personal FB page. Thanks. (Am in a slight WP spam war)