The teams meet for the sixth time in two years, with
Ireland needing a win and Denmark a point to reach Euro 2020
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” It was the premise of the 1993 cinema hit Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray played Phil Connors, a cynical, egotistical and misanthropic TV weatherman who finds himself reliving the same 24 hours over and over and over again while working on location in the hick town of Punxsutawney. More recently, the footballers of Denmark and the Republic of Ireland have found themselves trapped in a similarly nightmarish scenario, apparently destined to meet each other time after time in a never-ending series of mind-numbingly tedious football matches. After four draws and one emphatic Danish victory, Monday night’s will be their sixth competitive meeting in two years.
Although Ireland’s goalkeeper Darren Randolph and his teammate Shane Duffy deserve some sort of footballing medal of valour for being the only two players from either nation to have played every single minute of every single encounter, one can’t help but feel that it is Christian Eriksen who is deserving of our most heartfelt sympathies. He is better than this. Or at least was better than this, a relentlessly awful fixture that always seemed somehow beneath a man of his extraordinary talents, until it inevitably dragged him down to its level. Ireland have become the Ned Ryerson to his increasingly world weary weatherman; old “Needle Nose Ned the Head” being the relentlessly cheerful former schoolmate of Connors in Groundhog Day, whose overbearing small-town insurance salesman shtick eventually earns him a haymaker in the chops by way of a greeting.