I'm Danish, and we won the European Championship back in 1992. That's when I really got into football. My dad had been a United fan since the late 60s, but I don't think I really resonated with that until the mid-90s. I was born in 1985, so I don't remember Fergie's early years.
I was seven years old in 1992. We were vacationing at a camping resort on Svinø (literally 'Swine Island,' quite a name) and had scheduled this holiday before anyone knew we would even play in the tournament. Denmark hadn't qualified, but due to the war in Yugoslavia, they were deemed ineligible and Denmark went in their place. It was an ugly war, too. A horrible period of time for them.
In any case, most of the Danish players were already on vacation. They had to be called back from wherever they were at the time. Michael Laudrup famously chose not to play in the tournament because he had fallen out with the head coach, Richard Møller Nielsen. In fairness Nielsen had very few credentials and was largely considered an interim coach, but one imagines that Michael Laudrup might have regretted it in hindsight. Meanwhile, his brother Brian took the headlines and was amazing throughout the whole tournament. He then went to Rangers but could have done better than that.
Anyway, we were out camping and I was seven years old. I could only barely understand how significant it was for Denmark to make it to the latter stages of the tournament. There was a common room at this camping resort, little more than a shack meant for maybe a dozen or fifteen people. It had a television, though--the only one available to anyone in the area.
As we progressed through the tournament, this common room in a shack, meant for a dozen or so people to sit and have breakfast, was transformed into something else entirely. People were sitting on tables, in windowsills, standing all along the walls, sitting on the floor, watching as we advanced through the tournament. It must have been three hundred degrees in there by the end of each game. There was condensation on the windows.
And then we won it. Germany, the best team in Europe at the time, were beaten--not just by one goal, but two! The first was by John "Faxe" Jensen (Faxe is a Danish beer brand, and he has always been called John Faxe here in Denmark) who was notorious for never scoring, but on that day, he did. The second goal, upon review, looks quite a lot like there was a bit of
handball involved, but this was long before VAR, so why not. The goalscoarer, Kim Vilfort, had gone back home in the middle of the knockout stages because his daughter had cancer and he had to see her in the hospital. He then returned to play at her urging, but she succumbed to the disease shortly after the tournament, at the age of six.
Peter Schmeichel kept us in it the whole time. That man was big enough to fill up the entire goal. You can't score if the goalie is so big that it's physically impossible for the ball to get past him, and he literally was, figuratively speaking. What a goalkeeper. I have his autograph on a 1990 World Cup football card that I made him sign when they came back home and I managed to stop him during the parade. He looked three meters tall at the time. We traded those cards at school. I had to trade Roberto Baggio
and Dennis Bergkamp for Schmeichel's card. When I tottered up to him and asked him to sign it, Peter said, "oh, you've got one of those as well? Heheh. Alright, here you go." In Danish, of course. Man was enormous.