The cautionary advice was that Norway’s players might not take too well to questions about Ada Hegerberg.
Her absence from the World Cup on grounds that she is not paid well enough has created vastly more interest than the team facing England in tonight’s quarterfinals.
Ingrid Hjelmseth, goalkeeper and senior player of the team, did not have the slightest compunction about addressing the issue. “No, no. It’s not a problem because the players who want to play for us are here,” she said. “It’s not a problem. It’s the way it is.”
Though Phil Neville has made much of the England ‘family’, it is Norway who have worked hardest to engender a team spirit in the two years since a diabolical Euro 2017 — bottom of their group, no points, no goals — in which superstar forwards Hegerberg and Caroline Graham Hansen could not combine.
Manager Martin Sjogren kept his job but a period of soul-searching saw the Norwegians searching for some much-needed team spirit. They came up with the motto — ‘stronger together’.
It’s suspiciously similar to the one Chris Coleman’s Wales flew under during their extraordinary Euro 2016 but you only needed to witness the shrieks of laughter on Tuesday during exercises testing the players reactions to see that Hegerberg is out of sight and mind. Ten or so players casually drifted across to talk after training. No side at this tournament has been more accessible.
They will be Neville’s toughest challenge yet: a confident, ball-playing outfit who gave France a run for their money in Nice and who believe that their passing game can damage England.
“When we really rely on the passing game and show the ability we have in the passes, we are going to be very hard to defend against,” said Sjogren. “We look at the English team and we see we have some decent opportunities to make them some problems [and create] some spaces.”
But it’s hard to avoid the impression that this nation, champions in 1995, want most of all to disprove that the English domestic game’s new-found wealth and fully professional status counts for much. Norway’s league is still semi-pro, with 15 of Sjogren’s squad juggling day jobs, but in 2017 Norway’s FA became the first in the world to pay its men and women internationals the same.
