Mads Junker, who turns 40 on Wednesday 21 April, scored goals on the assembly line in the Dutch Honorary Division, but on the national team he was missed.
Although the target nose was of the highest caliber, in the eyes of the national coach he was not complete enough to take on the role of lone striker. And Mads Junker actually partly agrees with that.
Therefore, he is also satisfied when he looks back on a career with seven internationals and one goal.
– I probably did not really have the talent and abilities for the national team – and then I still had it in a period where I scored on everything I touched.
– It was really cool to be around the national team, but I probably did not really fit in under Morten Olsen and in 4-3-3. He needed a Bendtner type as a play station.
– It was a bit annoying when I was the highest scoring Dane abroad, says Mads Junker.
The biggest disappointment in relation to the national team was when he missed the European Championship finals in 2012.
– I was in almost all the qualifiers, at least on the bench. I thought I would join as a joker, but Nicklas Pedersen was chosen instead, says Mads Junker.
It was in the 2009/10 and 2010/11 seasons that Junker was hot. Here he scored 41 goals and also added up to a double-digit number of goals in the Honorary Division.
The success in Holland came a few years after the low point of his career. He ended up in a media storm in the autumn of 2005, when it emerged that he had cheated his teammates in FC Nordsjælland for a five-figure amount in poker.
The same autumn, however, he was anything but headwind on the field and scored 15 times in the Super League, which paved the way for the switch to Dutch football.
At the end of a goal-oriented career, he spent the autumn of 2014 in Indian football with a number of former stars such as Alessandro Del Piero, Robert Pires, David Trezeguet and Fredrik Ljungberg.
Mads Junker is today a football commentator and expert on TV2. He is married and has two children.
Source: The Nordic Page