Ahead of tomorrow’s semifinal, Denmark’s Kasper Schmeichel basically mocked England’s constant urge to win a major tournament.
Kasper Schmeichel just mocked England’s famous ‘football is coming home’ motto, he did it during today’s press conference. For decades, every time the English compete in a massive tournament they expect to win it. But recent years have awakened this sense of entitlement as one of the most powerful countries on earth. In fact, having won a single major tournament in 1966 (World Cup) is a pretty weak resume for the nation that invented football. Hence Kasper Schmeichel’s response to a question from an English journalist today.
They keep saying football is coming home when in fact, they’ve never won the European Championship before. Plus, they’ve only won a single World Cup title in their history. If anything, it makes more sense to consider countries such as Brazil, Italy, or Germany as football’s home. You could see Kasper Schmeichel’s grin as he responded to this loaded question from an English journalist. He wanted to know what Denmark needs to do in order to stop football from “coming home”.
Did Schmeichel say what we are all thinking?
As soon as the question was dropped on Schmeichel, this is what he said via ESPN FC: “Has it ever been home? I don’t know. Have you ever won it? ’66? Was that not the World Cup? To be honest I haven’t given any thought to what it would mean to stop England. It’s more what it would do for Denmark. I’ve focused very little on the England team. It’s what it would do for our country back home. The joy it would bring to five million back home to do something like that, to compete with the nations we are competing with.
“Not really a lot of feelings for England on this. When you have a team with so many world stars like England, the expectations are always going to be high. I can’t imagine such a team will be affected by what the country expects of them. But they respect us. They know we are going to fight until the end. It’s incredible to be here with these boys after everything we have been through in the last 10 years. It’s going to be an incredible moment.”