Great Danes Are No Dogs With Upset Over Germany : Soccer: Denmark wins European title with a stunning 2-0 victory over World Cup champions.
Not even Hans Christian Andersen at his most inspired could have penned this Danish fairy tale-come-true.
And the final chapter, written on an evening of high drama, was the best of all.
Denmark, hardly an international soccer power, defeated world champion Germany, 2-0, in front of 37,800 mostly delighted fans at Ullevi Stadium Friday night for its first European championship.
The victory sent a sea of red-and-white-painted Danes spilling out into the streets of Gothenburg to celebrate the night away, and no doubt carry the party all the way back to Copenhagen.
To say that the result, achieved on goals by John Jensen in the 19th minute and Kim Vilfort in the 80th, was a surprise doesn’t begin to do justice to the occasion. Germany was an overwhelming favorite to add the European title to the World Cup it won in Italy two years ago.
But, as Denmark proved by beating tournament favorite France last week, and defending European champion Holland earlier this week, fairy tales can come true.
“I can’t describe my feelings,” Danish midfielder Brian Laudrup said afterward. “We are the European champion. You all have to learn Danish now!”
Berti Vogts, the German coach who took over from Franz Beckenbauer after Germany’s Italia ’90 triumph, was more subdued.
“The Danes have been carried on a wave of euphoria,” he said, hardly needing to explain that Denmark was not even supposed to be in the eight-nation, two-week tournament, let alone win it.
Denmark was invited almost as an afterthought when Yugoslavia was thrown out of the event because of the ethnic war raging in that country. The Danes, who finished second to Yugoslavia in qualifying play, were told only a week or so before the finals began that they would be participating. Many of the players came back off summer vacation to join the squad.
How unheralded were the Danes? Well, even before the semifinals and even after Denmark had tied England, 0-0, lost by a single goal to host Sweden, 1-0, and upset France, 2-1, both the German and Dutch soccer federations asked to buy the Danish federation’s allocation of tickets for the championship game.
“Arrogance” was how Danish goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel summed up those requests. Schmeichel, a towering figure in the nets who played flawlessly Friday night, was as amazed as teammate Laudrup that his side had triumphed.
“We’ve won the European championship,” he said at the packed postgame news conference. “We don’t understand that yet. To play the Germans is always difficult. They’ve got the experience of (having reached) finals in major tournaments.
“We knew they were going to come at us from the first whistle, but we believed we could do the same to them.”
The match, while not a classic of pure soccer, nevertheless held the fans at Ullevi and the estimated 507 million watching on television in 135 countries on the edge of their seats. For 90 minutes, the Germans mounted one attack after another, but the Danish defense, tired, bruised and battered as it was, held firm.
Denmark, meanwhile, relied on its not-infrequent counterattacks, led by Laudrup and striker Flemming Povlsen.
As time wore on, it became increasingly evident that an upset was in the making.
“We’d lost what looked an easy task on paper but was not easy (on the field),” said Andreas Brehme, the German defender whose penalty kick goal against Argentina gave Germany its World Cup in 1990.
“Football (soccer) is this way,” Danish Coach Richard Moller Nielsen said. “The Germans had the best players, star players all of them, (but) my players gave everything they had.”
