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PEP-TALK: From left: Lars Lagerbäck, assistant Per Joar Hansen and Joshua King. Photo: Bjørn S. Delebekk
ULLEVAAL (VG) He is a top scorer in his class, has the highest number of scorers and hardly anyone has played better for Norway in the last three years. Perhaps it is not surprising that Lars Lagerbäck looks at Joshua King (28) before the anniversary of the Swede.
Friday’s game against Austria in the Nations League, which opens the World Cup qualifiers for the Qatar championship in 2022, will be Lars Lagerbäck’s 30th game as coach of the Norwegian national team.
In the last press conference before the Ullevaal match, VG challenged the Swede on which players have scored the most and which matches he remembers best, 1310 days after he sat in the same football stadium and introduced himself as the new coach of the Norwegian national team.
– I can list a lot of people, especially the younger ones, but if you take someone like Josh (King), I think it has developed. He may have grown especially mentally, if I may say so. He takes a lot more responsibility for the team and does a very good job starting our defensive game. He wasn’t very good at it in 2017, says Lars Lagerbäck
On the other hand, the Bournemouth forward was already well ahead of the rival goal. In his 19 international appearances with Lagerbäck, King has ten goals, five assists and an average of 5.94 in the VG exchange.
Martin Ødegaard (not against Austria) cuts higher after his fabulous last fall (6.25), but has far fewer games than King.
– He has been a star in our team and a leader since I joined the national team. A man who has great respect and has admired everything he has delivered in the national team. Josh has certainly grown and only gets better and better over the years, says Sander Berge.
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The midfielder has been with us all the time, since the national team’s debut in Lars Lagerbäck’s first away game against Northern Ireland in March 2017. It is safe to say that a lot has happened since the match at the that Håvard Nordtveit was a central midfielder and Rosenborg’s current substitute Gustav Valsvik played as a midfielder. .
Northern Ireland will most likely realize this when it meets the Norwegian edition of Lagerbäck in Belfast next Monday.
– Northern Ireland (in 2017) it was I who contributed to things not going so well. I was a little too ambitious and I was too fast. The absolute best performance we have done was against Spain here. We had 45 percent ball possession and a lot of long attacks against them. They even made defensive changes towards the end of the match, I had never seen Spain do that, Lagerbäck notes of the October draw.
Throughout the week, the national coach is asked about the transformation of the players and the team during their previous 29 matches. On each occasion, he points out that the Norwegian national team has first moved up the last level.
– We weren’t very good the first year. “We had to do some proper ‘deep dives’ to get a high low, describes the Swede.
Off the field too, there has been momentum: both Vice Captain Omar Elabdellaoui and Joshua King spoke this week about social life at the meeting as an improvement over the previous one. Both were often on the team, even when predecessor Per-Mathias Høgmo was the coach of the national team.
It is much more than nationality that separates Lagerbäck from Høgmo, including the results. In Høgmo’s 29 first, there were nine wins, seven draws and 13 losses. Lagerbäck has converted to 15 wins, 8 draws and 6 losses, including being undefeated in all 14 home games.
– One of the main reasons is performance. It will be so. When you get good experiences on the field, you win games and you don’t lose games, it accumulates a lot on and off the field. Slowly but surely, we have gained more and more confidence in ourselves, says Vice Captain Eladellaoui, one of the Swede’s most used players.
the the most used is Markus Henriksen. The man from Trøndelag without a club is always on the team and always on Lars Lagerbäck’s field. But with only four games for Bristol City since the last international game (against Malta in November), and the last game played dating back to February 25, Lagerbäck was asked if it would be “unnatural” to include the 28-year-old in the starting lineup against Austria.
– I can well imagine that Markus could have played, Lagerbäck counterattacks.
P.S.! Erling Braut Haaland scored a total of 44 goals for Salzburg and Borussia Dortmund last season, but in the A squad he is still scoreless. Haaland has only lost twice, in the European Championship qualifiers last fall, since the home opener against Malta (2-0) and the final quarter away against Sweden (1-1).
