Gary Neville, the former Manchester United defender and current soccer pundit, blanches as he recalls an argument between Peter Schmeichel and the team’s manager, Alex Ferguson, after a 3-3 draw with Liverpool in 1994.
“I wish there had been a camera to film it,” he says. “It’s the most ferocious argument I’ve ever seen. Absolute madmen. It was vicious; evil.”
Owen Davies’s engaging documentary portrait about the retired Danish footballer, who is currently touring as a musician, includes surprising details. For his first six years, for example, Peter Schmeichel was a Polish citizen, via his alcoholic father whose mother died in a concentration camp.
Schmeichel’s parents met at a production of the British film A Taste of Honey. Some diplomatic wrangling later, Peter was a promising young Danish prospect who immediately settled on goalkeeping. The existential dread expressed in a defining early scene from Wim Wenders’s The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, was an enticement rather than an impediment.
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As a child, most of his friends supported Liverpool or Bayern Munich. Schmeichel’s heart was set on Manchester United, and he signed for them in August 1991. He won a whole cabinet full of trophies at the club, including five Premier League titles, as well as an unlikely European Championship with Denmark in 1992. Schmeichel ended his Manchester career on a high in 1999 with the Champions League final victory that rounded off the treble.
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Eric Cantona is good value as a talking head. Ferguson is on hand to chuckle about how many goalies he tried out. Neville, in both archive footage and recollection, is stricken to recall that his former team-mate, following a brief stint at Sporting Lisbon, returned to the Premier League to play for Manchester United’s rivals Aston Villa and Manchester City.
Schmeichel’s favourite win was seeing his son, Kasper, currently at Celtic, lift the Premier League trophy with Leicester in 2016. “He’s much more present now,” says his daughter, Cecile.
The elder Schmeichel’s focus was not always trained on family and friends. “There was this idea that we didn’t get along,” he recalls as a clip from the 1990s alights on Roy Keane. “I was not there to make friends.”
Fair enough. But one can’t help but think this doc would be livelier with some thoughts from the formidable shot-stopper’s Cork comrade.
Schmeichel is available to stream from Friday, February 21st
