Joachim Andersen has had better three-minute periods during his career than the 180 seconds that ultimately decided the fate of this last-16 tie in Dortmund, Germany’s first knockout win at a major tournament since 2016.
From ecstasy to ignominy to agony. Denmark were somehow both comfortably beaten (scoreline) and left to rue that they could have caused deep German regret.
The two incidents were marginal, because football is increasingly destined to live on the edge and be best watched in freeze frame. Andersen was a straying toenail from Denmark taking a lead that may even have been deserved. The ball then nicked off an outstretched hand and feathered the ball to first slip. Snickometer says: heartbreak.
This was not your normal knockout match, and not only because of the 25-minute meteorological delay.
With Dortmund sent into early darkness by storm clouds, thunder, lightning and hail, as if even the weather gods couldn’t bear to miss out on the game, referee Michael Oliver took the players from the pitch. In the same usual places, rent-a-bad-opinion havers cried woke, because the last thing we want is to protect footballers from being hit by lightning.
Around it, the match was open and aesthetically pleasant. Germany seized advantage from the off, desperate not to get sucked into the same lethargy as beset them against Switzerland.
Jamal Musiala, Kai Havertz and Leroy Sane stretched the game and stretched Denmark too. Marking those three at once is like being told to monitor six cats and three toddlers at once.
But Denmark are resilient beasts. At the moment they were able to slow down the game – slow pass, slow pass, oooh look it’s another slow pass – they began to pass between the lines and find spaces in midfield.
One doesn’t like to pick on a young striker, but Rasmus Hojlund had three chances and missed them all. His time will come but they desperately needed it to come now.
The game changer and game winner for Germany was Havertz. There has been an ongoing debate in Germany about whether he or Niclas Fullkrug should lead the line from the start, and Fullkrug has done nothing wrong.
But this is surely the best combination: Havertz dipping and dropping into space to give defenders twisted blood, Fullkrug coming on when they’re tired. Float like a butterfly, charge like a bull.
Havertz remains eminently, impossibly fascinating. His own game was distilled in far fewer than 180 seconds, one move in the second half when he took a touch and played a through-ball to himself in one touch and then missed the subsequent one-on-one. So beautiful, so infuriating.
But beauty wins out when Havertz has such a difference on those around him. With two of Musiala, Sane and Florian Wirtz flitting around him, Havertz is a shapeshifter.
In the space of 90 minutes he played as a central forward, wide right and wide left. He is front and centre of Germany’s attack and yet spends very little time literally there.
You sense that Germany’s tournament, as public emotion starts to build via the medium of replica shirts and flags on cars on the Autobahn, may well be defined not by the old timers who are looking to leave their righteous legacies: Manuel Neuer, Toni Kroos, Ilkay Gundogan.
Instead, it will be their No 7, he of the grace and the panache and the magnificent movement. Either that will make Germany’s home tournament, or an inopportune miss will break it.
