When the game schedule for the sixth house in the 2022 World Cup qualifiers was published, it was clear that playing in Copenhagen was an almost impossible task.
After feeling the Danes on our flesh at Bloomfield Stadium and seeing them give a show at Euro 2020, the threshold went down - and the almost impossible became impossible with a few exclamation marks following it.
Denmark is everything we want to be in sports and we are not (some would say not only in sports).
A country with a deep-rooted sports culture that is part of the local folklore, with a tradition of success in the last 30 years passed from the old and the young, more than 300 thousand children registered for football clubs (out of five million plus residents, with us a little more than 50 thousand out of nine Million plus), and with the understanding that sport is education and that its contribution to society is invaluable.
If I use a paraphrase of Professor Avishai Ben - Haim's statement, the Danish national football team is the hegemonic that is unaware of its hegemony.
It's a team with top players in every position, physically, technically strong, tactically disciplined, united (something that intensified at Euro 2020 after the collapse of star Christian Eriksen), and this concert is won by one of the best national team coaches in the world today, Caspar Yolmand.
Scooby Olsen vs. Glazer and Menachem, Photo: AFP,
The Danes came up with a set of three brakes and presented coordinated attack patterns and a lot of exchanges between the defenders and the wingers.
Even Mikel Damsgor, the new Eriksen, who gets complete offensive freedom and every touch of his ball looks like the magic of a combination of strength, training and coordination in stationary situations.
For the first 25 minutes we were still living in the illusion that we could deal with what the Danes were offering, but from the moment the ball touched the net for the first time, the Danes were released - and our team collapsed, physically and mentally.
In defense of the team, it should be said that the schedule left no chance at all. In the game against the Faroe Islands, the Danes let nine of their ten field players rest on the bench, and in this game window they played twice at home. To Scandinavia in six days, two games with almost no exchanges, and a high physical and mental peak three days before the game in Copenhagen (the mighty 2: 5 over Austria).
If you make a general summary of the current game sequence, you can be satisfied.
6 points, a huge victory over Austria and good ability of many attacking players.
Now everything actually drains to October 9 in Glasgow.
Yes, you go back to the same place again and you have to win there again if you want to keep dreaming of second place.
The Scottish team is better and stronger than us, but unlike the Danes, the gaps here can be bridged.
On a given day - this is quite a possible task, even if the Scots are favorites.
But for that to happen, Rotensteiner will have to find solutions to the defensive weakness (Al Hamid, the only stopper on the team who physically gets along with strong strikers, will be absent because of yellows).
Nir Bitton will probably return to 11, and one of the possible solutions could be to incite Dor Peretz to the position of brake, in order to improve the height game and also the movement of the ball.
But another vision for the date.
In the meantime, we will return to the league, to the Conference League, and we will wait patiently for a month for the important away game, in the hope that this time we will return from there happy and satisfied.
Alhamid and Natcho, Photo: EPA,