Stavanger (from our correspondent) – No calm, on the contrary impulsive type. Fans play videos of how he can run amok in front of the courtside bench. When he’s in full swing, he doesn’t look at all like a man who’s come back to life from the other side. The opposite is true.
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Stale Solbakken, currently the coach of the Norwegian national team, was already clinically dead at the end of his playing career, his heart did not beat for seven minutes. He miraculously survived a collapse caused by a birth defect and became a successful trainer. And he hopes that one day he will also call his son to the most valuable jersey.
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Footballers such as Marc-Vivien Foe, Miklos Feher, Antonio Puerta or Gregory Mertens were not so lucky in the same cases. He managed to survive.
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FC Copenhagen footballer Zdeněk Pospěch next to coach Staale Solbakken.Photo: Milan Malíček, The law
“A critical moment that I will never forget. I could have died wearing the club colours…” Stale Solbakken recounts the dramatic events of March 2001, when he was still playing for FC Copenhagen himself.
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Markus was not even a year old at the time… “I took the oldest child to school and then went to training, everything was normal. But I went into cardiac arrest while warming up. It was a cognitive disorder of the heart’s activity, which can occur under certain psychological stress,” Dad recalls.
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He only knows the next sequence of events from the story. Slobakken’s shocked teammates called an ambulance, attempts to revive the heart right on the field were futile. “It’s a miracle he’s alive. He was clinically dead, his heart stopped beating for seven minutes,” says the then club doctor Frank Odgaard, who immediately tried to massage the heart.
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The whole club was enveloped in grief, waiting for the worst news to arrive from the hospital. It was only there that the doctors discovered that the reason was a previously undiscovered congenital heart defect. However, Solbakken woke up after 30 hours of severe unconsciousness and left for his home two weeks later.
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“When I woke up, I felt a little better. But for the other people around me, it was horrible. They didn’t know what had happened, what would happen to me, if my brain would function as before. The experience was not only traumatic for me, but for the whole team, family and everyone at the club.”
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The long collapse was avoided without consequences, simply a miracle. Solbakken was given a pacemaker and, on top of that, permission to continue playing football. But at the age of 33, he preferred to end his career. “The heart was strong again, the risk only theoretical. However, with my wife and children, we decided that it was not worth tempting fate any more,” explains the Norwegian international.
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And so he became the coach who made his Copenhagen famous. However, those who expected that he would be a calm coach after returning from the grave were seriously mistaken. “He may have calmed down in life, certainly not on the bench. He is terribly impulsive,” points out former Czech international Zdeněk Pospěch, who under Solbakken experienced a famous era with the Champions League at Parken Stadion.
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“He went from mud to puddle, he absolutely did not calm down. He was already impulsive as a player, he experiences even greater emotions on the bench. However, videos of his outbursts are also circulating,” smiles Libor Sionko, another Czech graduate of Solbakken’s Copenhagen school.
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Now Markus also applies for the floor. The young midfielder has been a Viking player since this February. The national team is everyone’s dream goal, but the senator is very reserved about joining his father in the same team.
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“I would rather not play under my dad. We talked about it for fun. And then, we still have a long way to go before the national team. On the other hand, there are a few coaches’ kids who think it’s not so bad,” grins Markus Solbakken.
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At the weekend, he scored the opening goal of the league match in which Stavanger lost to Valerengo 2:4 in Oslo.
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Now it’s Sparta’s turn to properly test and finally defeat young Solbakken and his Viking for the second time…
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