You’ll be leaving soon, Lars Lagerbäck – NRK Sport – Sports news, results and broadcast schedule

The press release seemed, at best, noteworthy.

It is hard to see that the leaks to VG about the dispute between Alexander Sørloth and the leadership of the national team should be enough to justify such a one-sided statement through the Norwegian Football Association.

That Lagerbäck was outraged seemed obvious, and certainly understandable. He wrote that he had never experienced anything like this since taking over the Swedish Under-21 national team in 1990.

But it remains incomprehensible why even more details of the normally closed rooms should be released to the public. – and that of the director of the national team.

Communication chaos

What should possibly be a clarification that the guard of the collective, that is, Lagerbäck, has its troops in order, left exactly the opposite result. No confident leader needs to have the sympathy of the public in a case like this.

Also, the NFF did something else that is a bit sensational, when they wrote that Sørloth did not want to comment further on the case. Therefore, Sørloth emphatically refuted during the night. Which led to all the dimensions of the case even more incomprehensible.

Statements by national team manager Lars Lagerbäck, broadcast via NFF on its website, were contradicted by national team player Alexander Sørloth, broadcast through agent Morten Wivestad at NTB, before the coaches of the national teams Lagerbäck, Hansen and Grodås were again at odds with Sørloth collectively, broadcast by national team media manager Svein Graff.

This is a showdown in such a cautious and not very direct way that it probably fits well with Sørloth’s apparent perception of the Norwegian approach to international matches this fall.

But the fact that it is published in public strongly suggests that it is far more irreconcilable than one would like to describe.

Hardly Sørloth alone

Alexander Sørloth and several of the players are said to have reacted strongly after the Serbia match. The reason was that Norway was apparently taken totally by surprise by the Serbian tactic, without having prepared a counterattack. This culminated in the leaked conflict a few days later.

Now he presents himself as if Alexander Sørloth is alone in this. In all probability he was not. Everything indicates that the discontent on the Sørloth fronts has the support of several of the players.

And it is easy to think that it is the new generation that is leading the way. There is also nothing to indicate that dissatisfaction with the Norwegian approach to the tactical approach started only after the Serbia match.

In this sense, the support of the team captain Johansen, Elabdellaoui and King, of course also through the NFF websites, is not very important either. Firstly, the three most reliable Lagerbäck since 2017, and secondly, they cannot say otherwise, as is the situation now.

And the situation is that nobody knows what it is right now. Nor how will the reactions be when the national team meets again, for the last three international matches this year in November.

Soon unbearable

But what is now obvious is that Lagerbäck faces a completely new situation.

From here until the end of your stay in Norway, every withdrawal, every facial expression, every team line-up, every mismatch and every substitution will be interpreted and analyzed in light of what happened in the aftermath of the Serbia match.

And that’s a situation that quickly becomes unbearable, in search of a new approach and renewed optimism towards the regular World Cup qualifiers next year. There, too, we will face resistance that is supposedly stronger than Serbia, with the demands it will make for tactical adaptation.

Lagerbäck’s project has been based on discipline and fidelity to the project and philosophy.

When this works, you need a mediocre Icelandic team at best for the quarter-finals of the European Championship.

When it doesn’t, Norway is overtaken by Serbia in a playoff match at Ullevaal.

And will anyone ever believe that trust in the Norwegian team will once again be absolute with Lars Lagerbäck as boss? Barely. Because clearly there is a group in the group that is already moving forward and wants something more. And when it takes time to build trust, it resists much faster, as NRK soccer expert Carl-Erik Torp also mentions.

You’ll be out soon, Lars Lagerbäck

The feeling of increasing player power in a fragmented group will seem toxic to a performance culture. The same is true of a lack of true loyalty, no matter to what extent. Because if all this shows something, it is that the deficiency has taken root.

And then we are, like it or not, in the process of the countdown to the Lagerbäck sorti. And I think he knows it well himself. Lagerbäck offered to resign after the loss to Serbia. After the three games in November, I think he will do it anyway.

Therefore, parts of the press release can be read quickly as a farewell letter and as a manifesto against fledgling culture.

Soon you don’t have to deal with it, but someone else has to. One of the candidates who has been mentioned as a possible successor is assistant coach Per Joar Hansen.

Perhaps that’s also why Lagerbäck writes: “For the sake of the integrity of the coaches and anonymous sources in the VG coverage, we had to deviate from this principle and comment on what happened,” and with that try to save Hansen’s status internally..

Hansen, who in August called Lagerbäck the best in the world to coach national teams, no less, is the one who should have given Sørloth the final ultimatum on repatriation when the conflict peaked before the game against Northern Ireland..

Hansen has also experienced being sent off for player lifts before, when he had to resign as Rosenborg coach in 2014. In the Rosenborg stable at the time was a young forward named Alexander Sørloth.

A bus driver, a bus driver

Now Sørloth himself has been thrown under the bus, as he is so poetically called. And that’s for your own bus driver.

It has happened before on the NFF side, also under the direction of a Swedish national team coach.

Aleksander Sørloth is not Ada Hegerberg here yet, but there are obvious parallels in how one wants to present them from a central level in Norwegian football.

Some would hope that one had learned.