87. WHEN TO LOOK AWAY - Reflecting on Christian Eriksen's Collapse
When footballer Christian Eriksen fell to the ground for seemingly no reason during the Denmark versus Finland match the first weekend of Euro 2020, it was clear something was terribly wrong. Previously in the match, other players had bashed heads, kicked shins, and fallen to the ground with some clear causal story of how they got there. Two players were running around already with cotton wool stuffed up their nostrils to stem their bleeding noses. But this wasn't that. This was a man running towards a ball, stumbling before he got there, and then collapsing.
And he wasn't getting up.
It soon became apparent to everyone that this was no ordinary occurrence. Pale and troubled faces were saying too much with their worried eyes as medics surrounded the prone player. Fans were reduced to a hushed quiet, and then - both beautiful and eerie - the Danish team formed a human shield around whatever was happening on the pitch to protect Eriksen's dignity from the prying eyes of the world. We were looking to Copenhagen for an enjoyable afternoon of sport but were getting, instead, a seeming tragedy.
I don't normally watch football. I am a baseball man myself, and, of course, despite my ethical hand-wringing about it, a wrestling fan. My wife enjoys tennis, and sometimes I join her and watch that too, as I had the night before Eriksen's collapse. At the French Open, Novak Djokovic had battled "King of the Clay", Rafael Nadal in a four hour classic and we hadn't had time to watch any of the Euro 2020 tournament yet by the time we sat down for the Denmark Finland game. My dislike of football, it turned out during the World Cup in 2018, when I found myself quite enjoying the tournament for the first time since Italia '90 (which was more due to a love of Pavarotti than of football), came not from any specific dislike of the game but rather from the psychology of having my father try and force me to love football as much as he did. Using the far-from impressive Bury FC as his mechanism to achieve this probably didn't help either. Dad loved "The Shakers", and dragged me to Gigg Lane many Saturdays as a child to see them play. The problem was, each match meant a weekend away from my friends, and so football to me became equated with resentment and frustration. It was only after my dad died that I discovered that, without all the emotional baggage attached, the so-called "beautiful game" really was quite compelling. So since 2018 I have watched the odd bit here and there, casually, and after picking Germany to win in the staff-room sweepstakes for Euro 2020 I decided this summer was as good a time as any to get into some football again. Football now, after all, has this strange emotional resonance with me as something that makes me feel both close to my father and sad that I hadn't had this revelation about the sport he loved back when he was still alive. Probably the last games he took me to were Euro '96. I was the extra ticket he needed back then to build up enough purchase credit to be eligible for one Final ticket in some pyramid scheme he was involved in for cheaper tickets, and I remember enjoying a Mars bar at Wembley the night Gareth Southgate missed his infamous penalty more than anything about the actual match. But I do remember the tournament, in hindsight, as a series of lovely road-trips around the country with my dad. Were he alive today, he would've been excited to know that I was watching my first Euro tournament since then, so after missing the opener between Turkey and Italy the night before, and that morning's Wales match against Switzerland, weekend chores done, snacks made, my wife and I settled down for an afternoon of football.
Instead, we appeared to be watching a man die.
As a wrestling fan, there are only a handful of WWE pay-per-views I have missed over the years. I am happy to say that Over The Edge 1999 was one of them. It took place during my first attempted weening away from the product over growing ethical concerns back when I was a teenager and just happened to be the one event during that period I decided to "boycott". That was the night wrestler, Owen Hart died, falling from the rafters of the arena and into the ring as an attempted stunt went badly wrong. Witnessed live by the audience and all at ringside, including the commentary team, who were visibly shaken as the camera pulled away from the ring and stuck with them as doctors examined the body of their fallen friend, the accounts of all who watched the event live is one of trauma. Deaths had been reported on screen before - Brian Pillman, dead in his hotel room before a big pay-per-view was the last one I remembered when my friends recounted what had happened to me the next day- but to actually see the incident take place sounded harrowing. Years later I would think of this as I switched over to the news on September 11th, 2001, to see this plane I had heard had hit the World Trade Centre in New York City. I'd watch in horror as a second one hit the other tower, and then be speechless as people started throwing themselves to their deaths to escape the inferno inside...and find myself shaking with shock as both towers soon collapsed in front of my eyes.
Eriksen's collapse, his blankly staring face poking out between the gaps in the human shield as medics performed emergency CPR, the tears of his fellow teammates, the weeping crowd, his distraught wife, all felt terribly similar in tone to these other televised tragedies. Commentators lost for what to say but still feeling the need to fill the pregnant air; the cameras not knowing where, or if, to look.
On the BBC tragedy did briefly turn to comedy - the decision was made to stop broadcasting the game and return to the studio. In the few minutes of time before the match coverage was terminated and an old episode of Garden Rescue was put on as replacement programming, Gary Lineker, Cesc Fabregas, Alex Scott and Micah Richards found themselves dropping the football punditry as the gravity of what they had witnessed hit them, and they became impromptu philosophers instead, waxing lyrical about the irrelevance of the game once put into perspective by the fragility of life. They did a great job in a tricky situation, and I for one would commission a full-length football pundits answer life's big questions show as a matter of some urgency. But the sheer awkward weirdness of the scene did lighten the heavy mood for a few minutes.
But what is the point of all this rambling? Currently Lineker and company have provided more philosophy in this post than I have. Furthermore, I am writing as if Eriksen died that evening; which he did not. Though he did have a significant cardiac arrest, he was eventually resuscitated and is currently alive and recovering in hospital. We did not watch a man die that day. We watched a man have his life saved and experience the love of thousands who watched on, hoping for his recovery, as well as the human decency of his teammates giving him and the doctors privacy in an arena full (well, "Covid-era" full) of spectators and with cameras beaming his medical emergency all around the world. We watched Danish and Finnish fans and players come together in compassion rather than compete (at least until they restarted the game once Eriksen was ok and gave his blessing, at which point Finland rather uncharitably beat Denmark 1-0) and we watched football pundits tell us the game they had spent their whole lives committed to was "meaningless".
The philosophical question, therefore, is the ethical question: when Eriksen collapsed, was it right to keep the cameras rolling?
In the days since, many have criticised the broadcasters for continuing to show traumatic footage. The collapsed player, the crying teammates, the shocked fans, the devastated wife, even the philosophical pundits shaken by what they had seen. Couldn't, in fact shouldn't, the stream have been cut and the tragedy kept as far out of the public eye as it could be?
The argument for keeping the cameras rolling, of course, is that this was a newsworthy and developing story. We had all seen Eriksen collapse. To suddenly cut to black might actually enhance the trauma by compounding it with uncertainty and the unrestricted speculation of our own imagination. Horror writer, Clive Barker, once described a childhood event he believes shaped his desire to write macabre stories. An air-show accident. A man falling to his death from the sky. It wasn't seeing the man fall that haunted him. Nor was it the man crashing to the earth at the moment of impact - he didn't actually see that. Instead it was the adults around him telling him not to look and covering his face so he couldn't see. It was the not seeing that made it worse. Imagining what was happening without the limits of reality to reign in his stampeding thoughts. If I had watched Christian Eriksen collapse, his teammates look worried, the doctors run onto the pitch and then the screen go black and suddenly Garden Rescue comes on, I would have known something awful had happened, but not know exactly what. And that would be my cue to make up the worst possible things in my head. Although we were probably all doing the same thing as we watched the live scenes anyway - imagining the worst - we were simultaneously confronted with the reality of unfolding events to remind us it was just that: imagination. Though horrible to watch, it grounded our worst thoughts to the limits of what was actually happening instead of letting our imaginations run wild.
Critics, however, point to the fact that this was clearly a terrible medical emergency and human decency asks that we look away. The Denmark team surrounded Eriksen's body to keep him from view of the stadium fans and television cameras, flags were used as sheets to add further privacy to the situation. If the cameras watching the event can see these two signals suggesting that privacy is needed (human shields and curtains) then by actively searching for other visuals which communicate exactly that which is being hidden - the tears, the buried heads, the crying wife - they are arguably failing to be sensitive to the demands of the situation. Playing the equivalent role of Clive Barker's shielding adults, the camera could have cut to the sky, the grass, or any other unmoving inanimate object and the commentators could explain that we are "looking away" to give Christian Eriksen his privacy.
I am cautious, however, of saying that anyone should have turned away. In a way it is this instinct not to look at the more horrific moments of human life that give them their traumatic power. This is not an argument for desensitisation, but if the correct response to a person collapsing in cardiac arrest is to look away, then whose job is it to attend to the emergency and bring help? While those of us watching at home could not help Christian Eriksen, by watching the speedy work of the medics we are reminded what to do if someone collapsed in front of us. We are reminded not to walk quickly by and hope someone else will take care of it. We are reminded of how fragile this life can be. And, when we hear of Eriksen's recovery, we are grateful. We remember that the worst is not always inevitable; that sometimes hopelessness can be surprised.
Another reason I held a grudge against football as a child was because I had an asthma attack once during PE and didn't have my inhaler. The PE teacher left me lying gasping for breath on the ground as he put the rest of my class into five-a-side teams before he attended to my medical needs. If it wasn't for a fellow student running to my aid and giving me a puff of their inhaler, who knows if I would be writing this today? I might just be one of those sad stories of an asthmatic kid who died at school because of a dopey teacher with no clue. I'm glad that student didn't spare me my dignity and "look away" as I gagged and cried on the floor.
I would find it a very odd response indeed to hear that someone watched that match up until the point of Eriksen's collapse and then they switched off the television and got on with their day as if it hadn't happened. To bury one's head and pretend the world is radically different than the way it really is seems just as inappropriate as those who mawkishly wanted to keep on staring into the abyss once we finally returned to the pundits in the studio. Neither response fully engages with the moment or deals with what is happening. Neither response feels quite right.
Perhaps then the real human condition is that both things are true? We can't look away and yet we always wish we did. And when we do, we wish we didn't. Most of the time I have found myself in a lengthy traffic jam it is not because of debris in the road or any real restriction to the driving, but rather because drivers are slowing down to take a peek at the grisly aftermath of an earlier accident on the other side of the road. Similar to Clive Barker, when I was a child I remember a friend's mother telling us all to close our eyes as we passed by the carnage of a car crash. I made the mistake of looking a little too long, wondering why it was we needed to close our eyes. I saw a pool of what looked like blood on the road. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't? But when I shut my eyes in disgust and fear what could have been a small puddle of oil or water became a pool of blood, and the mangled vehicles I saw in my mind were a tangle of broken limbs and bodies regardless of what was actually visible on the road.
On the one hand, Eriksen's team-mates created a human shield to block our view of the tragedy...but several of them still took a look behind them every now and again, violating the very privacy they had created. Their faces paled whenever they did.
Every one of us who felt uncomfortable with the continuing broadcast (not those in the stadium, but those of us watching on TV) had the ability to switch it off if we didn't want to look. To blame the broadcasters for keeping the cameras rolling is to deny oneself the agency of that moment. Yes, they could have cut away. But so could we. My Garden Rescue could have been my actual garden. I could have got off the couch and walked outside.
But I didn't.
I kept on looking despite wanting to look away.
Hence the ethical question really isn't was it right to keep the cameras rolling, but was it right for us to keep our televisions on when they did?
When Owen Hart died that night in 1999, the WWE - or rather Vince McMahon - decided to go on with the show. As their friend lay dead, the rest of the roster had to continue play-fighting for money and swallow down their tears. "The show must go on" and "it's what he would've wanted" were the deeply flimsy arguments used to justify this clear mistake. At least the match was postponed as Eriksen was stretchered off the pitch, and only re-started with his blessing. Ultimately life isn't always pretty, and when it gets ugly we may not have the clarity of thought to make perfect decisions. That we do as well as we do in the middle of traumatic moments, that we reflect and learn and grow is perhaps the thing to hold onto. We might get it wrong. Our gut instincts may not always be wise. But if it feels wrong to stare, perhaps it is, or perhaps it is just how we have been conditioned - to ignore the suffering of others so that we can continue with our currently suffering-free lives. After all, if we stared too much at the suffering of others we in the rich West might have to reassess the impact of our actions on the developing world. If we dwelled on the environmental damage our lifestyles inflict, the inequalities in existence, the divide between have and have-not - we might have to do something radical about it.
As always, as my dad was trying to tell me for so many years, sport - football - can bring us life lessons as well as entertainment. How we responded to the sight of a fallen player fighting for their life on the pitch might well be an indicator of something larger that we need to address in our lives. Maybe therefore the only ethical question in all of this then is why we feel the correct response to tragedy is to look away at all? Why are we so afraid of confronting the full horror of existence with all its warts and ugliness? What is it about awfulness that makes us want to flee instead of stay, and might the world be entirely different if that instinct could be changed?
Eriksen has been discharged from hospital now. Eriksen will live. His life saved by those who ran to help not those who averted their gaze. How many others, currently suffering, might be better served by our attention than by our polite attempts at giving them privacy?
Author: DaN McKee
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