One: My Autobiography by Peter Schmeichel

Author:Peter Schmeichel [Schmeichel, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529354140
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Published: 2021-09-29T16:00:00+00:00

Ebbe left for Benfica before we secured the title and Birger Peitersen guided us home, but Ebbe returned for the 1988 campaign, when we won the league easily again. But 1989 was not so good; we were second to Odense and it was totally ridiculous to concede the championship to them. We also went out of the European Cup to Club Brugge in the first round. At New Year 1990, a new manager arrived, Morten Olsen. He was as intense as Ebbe was laid-back.

On Morten’s first day we were told to report to the clubhouse at the training ground. The media was there, as was a big tray of champagne glasses. What? I knew Morten. I had spent three years playing with him for the national team and knew what kind of character he was: serious, very serious. To get a laugh out of him you had to tell the world’s funniest joke. Yet now the most serious guy I had met in my life was serving champagne to the media: what was going on?

Bjerregaard introduced him and Morten took over. He said he was proud to be Brøndby manager and was looking forward to the challenge. The aim, he said, was to drink more champagne. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘when you win trophies, you drink champagne . . .’ Then he put a glass to his lips. ‘Mmm, this tastes so nice.’ He handed the glasses round. ‘Let’s drink,’ he said. ‘Because this is the last time we’ll be having champagne until we win something.’

At the end of this pantomime, he sent us into the forest for a run. This was midwinter. On our normal route, there was a point where we turned right, went over a little hill and through the tunnel back to the clubhouse. ‘No,’ barked Morten when we got there. ‘Today we go left.’ We went left, all the way down to the beach and back again, which was crazy, crazy long. Some players had never run so far in their lives and came back with injuries.

It was an accurate taste of what Morten was going to be like. He had a knee injury and, having played in Germany, wanted to prevent us sustaining knee injuries by using German techniques. Every day after training we sat up against a wall, our posture 90 degrees, and raised our legs, holding the pose – for five sets, first of twenty seconds each and building up to one minute. Training started with a yoga exercise that we repeated ten times. In pre-season, one group ran in the woods for thirty minutes while another did circuits, then swapped, then swapped again. That was our morning session: ninety minutes of gym, ninety minutes of running. The afternoons involved more running and finally some ball work.

The weak players fell apart, but the strong ones became among the fittest footballers in Europe and we destroyed domestic opposition, winning the 1990 title and then again in 1991. Positionally, Morten did something interesting. He created pairs on the pitch.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.