Dane Christian Eriksen suffered a heart attack on Saturday during the match between Denmark and Finland but his condition is now stable.
The realization of the match chose not to take close-ups on the player but wanted to show the distress of the players, the public and the player's wife.
A decision that has led to strong indignation on social networks and which questions the difficult job of a director when such tragedies occur.
For his second day at the Euro, the famous French director Jean-Jacques Amsellem certainly did not expect to find himself in such a scenario. The one where a football player, Christian Eriksen in this case, collapses in the middle of a match and must be revived live in front of the eyes of millions of viewers. In his head, at that moment, must jostle a torrent of questions which must be answered in the second. His first decision was to force his teams to stop filming the player from the moment Eriksen collapsed.
"With more than thirty cameras in the stadium, we could have done it, but at no time did we go to make tight shots on him," he explained Saturday evening to our colleagues from
L'Equipe
.
This did not prevent him from taking an avalanche of criticism on social networks, from simple supporters to journalists to former football glory like Ian Wright, who begged the BBC to cut the broadcast and return to tray.
CUT TO THE STUDIO FFS !!!!
- Ian Wright (@ IanWright0) June 12, 2021
Where is the cursor between emotion and voyeurism?
The director, the only master on board to choose the images sent to TV channels around the world, is criticized for showing shots of players and supporters in tears on the pitch and in the stands of the Copenhagen stadium. This was justified: “If we take a wide general shot, we don't show emotion. It may take a long time ... but we also have to transcribe our feelings in the stadium. We showed the sadness and distress of the people, on the side of the players, the staff and the public. We also felt a union in this moment of great anxiety, it had to be transcribed. I don't call it voyeurism. "
A producer of sporting events for television (who prefers to remain anonymous) wants to show solidarity with his colleague, "who had to make important decisions in a very short period of time and in a necessarily very special atmosphere". He was not watching the match live and could only rely on the snippets of footage he found on the right, on the left, to form his own opinion.
“The images were shocking, so we can ask ourselves the question of how they felt in the OB van.
We are in the logic of a war machine to film football and suddenly we enter something deeply human.
So, has the full measure of the situation been taken?
I don't know, I just know it's extremely complicated to make decisions and have the right feeling.
Perhaps they did not fully perceive things but it is human, ”he debriefs.
Romain Grosjean and the Bahrain Grand Prix, a textbook case
The most controversial sequence will remain that of Christian Eriksen's wife, filmed several times in close-ups, in tears on the edge of the field.
If he explains that in a personal capacity he would have chosen not to film this, the director we contacted wonders above all about the protocol - or the absence of a protocol - established by UEFA in such a case. .
“I'm even amazed that he had to wonder if he was showing his wife or not.
In other sports, all this is planned upstream, we have many meetings to discuss the possibility of a serious accident and we brief our cameramen before the broadcast.
To decide well live, you have to have prepared the different scenarios, and this one gives the impression that it was not.
"
We all remember Romain Grosjean's terrible accident in F1 during the Bahrain Grand Prix.
That day, when we understand that what is happening is potentially dramatic, the director takes drastic action.
"For two minutes and fourteen seconds, he decides not to show anything on TV," recalls our witness, who has also already been confronted with similar situations.
An experience that Amsellem does not necessarily have, more accustomed to filming football than sports that could be described as more dangerous.
“Personally, if I had had to make choices, I would have applied what we always do in these cases, namely that we immediately go into a wide shot to be able to give ourselves time to understand if it is 'is very serious or not, ”he explains.
BBC apologizes to viewers
On Saturday, if we were able to see the offending sequences in mondiovision for many minutes, it is because UEFA found nothing to complain about.
Jean-Jaques Amsellem indicating that the only instruction he received from the body was not to film the cardiac massage performed by the rescuers on the Inter player.
A state of affairs that questions, eighteen years after the death of Marc-Vivien Foé in the semi-final of the Confederations Cup, at the Gerland stadium in Lyon in 2003.
“When a director does something he shouldn't be doing, not showing, he gets notified instantly. So that was not the case. Knowing the professionalism of this director, if there had been an established protocol, he would have applied it, that's for sure. So in my opinion, if we have to blame someone, it's more UEFA than the director. We cannot leave the director alone to face such responsibilities, ”blows the specialist. Contacted by
20 Minutes
, the European body did not deny but prefers to blame the television channels, arguing that “each broadcaster had the possibility of returning to the studio and many of them did so. It was therefore an editorial choice to stay with live images or not ”.
Television channels, which all receive the same images live (this is the famous international signal) are in fact free to decide what they broadcast to their viewers. On Saturday, beIN Sport opted for a return to the stage with the consultants, while broadcasting here and there live images from the stadium. The BBC has more or less opted for the same strategy but wished to apologize to people "who may have been upset by the images broadcast".
If he hopes that this event will mark a turning point in the realization of football matches and that an extremely precise protocol will be set up, the director interviewed by
20 Minutes
has a thought for Jean-Jaques Amsellem, under the spotlight of critics since 24 hours: “I'm sure he must be asking a lot of questions today.
It must be complicated to live with, I totally support him.
"
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