Nearly two hours after Christian Eriksen's heart stopped during Denmark's game against Finland Saturday in Euro 2020, the teams returned to the pitch and resumed their match, a decision that they now are questioning.

Soccer officials said that players were consulted and wanted to resume play, coming to a decision that one official said was "the least bad" one available under the circumstances. Eriksen is stable and undergoing tests in a Copenhagen hospital, but the sight of him receiving CPR and defibrillation on the pitch, shielded for privacy by his stunned teammates, remains unnerving.

"We were put in a position which I personally don't think we should have been put in," goalkeeper Kasper Schmeichel, who comforted Eriksen's wife on the pitch as he was being treated and visited Eriksen in the hospital Sunday, told reporters. "It probably required that someone above us had said that it was not the time to make a decision and maybe should wait for the next day."

Eriksen fell face-first to the turf in the 43rd minute of play and lay motionless while players and a referee immediately beckoned medical personnel onto the pitch, with the situation clearly dire.

"He was gone, and we did cardiac resuscitation. It was a cardiac arrest," Morten Boesen, a team medic, said, according to the Associated Press. "How close were we [to losing Eriksen], I don't know. We got him back after one defib, so that's quite fast. I'm not a cardiologist, so the details I will leave to the experts at the hospital."

He was conscious as he was taken to Rigshospitalet, where he is undergoing tests to determine what caused his collapse.

In a brief video made shortly after he arrived at the hospital Saturday, Eriksen told teammates to focus on the next game, Thursday's match against Belgium. Later Saturday, the game against Finland was resumed.

"I am still emotional about the situation," teammate Martin Braithwaite told reporters Monday (via Reuters). "Most importantly Christian is feeling better and therefore I am feeling better, too. His health is the most important thing of all. It was important for me personally to see that he felt better via video [before returning to play]. I had some pictures in my head from last Saturday that I would like to get rid of.

"We were all about to lose a friend and a teammate. It's not something you normally think of on a football pitch. Joy and love are normal. No one can prepare for what happened."

UEFA officials tweeted Saturday that "players of both teams" wanted the match to resume. "UEFA is sure it treated the matter with utmost respect for the sensitive situation and for the players," it said in a statement to the BBC. "It was decided to restart the match only after the two teams requested to finish the game on the same evening. The players' need for 48 hours' rest between matches eliminated other options."

Still, the emotion of the moment was apparent on players' faces.

"We had two options. None of the options were good. We took the least bad one," Braithwaite said (via the BBC). "There were a lot of players that weren't able to play the match. They were elsewhere [mentally]. You could have wished for a third option in this situation."

The general secretary of the international players' union preferred calling off the game, but that would have created logistical problems.

"It would have been better to cancel the game in that evening. Take a bit of time, take a breath, look at it with a bit more distance, look at what are the options to carry on with the game or not, and if the game can't be replayed then I think also that would not be very important in comparison to what happened there to Christian," Jonas Baer-Hoffman told Reuters.

"The players were probably not given a real option in terms of taking a good decision that was in that moment in balance with where they were mentally. There's a lot of lessons that need to be drawn from this."