“Norway used to be an almost team,” Morten Gamst Pedersen tells The Indian Express. “But almost is never enough.”
He would know. Pedersen played 83 times for Norway and lived through three separate World Cup qualifying campaigns, 2006, 2010, 2014, that each ended the same way: agonisingly short. This time there were no almosts. Norway held off a grandstand Brazil finish, Haaland’s second goal only arriving in the 90th minute before Neymar pulled one back in stoppage time, to reach the World Cup quarter-finals for the first time ever, 28 years after they last made a World Cup at all, having scored 37 goals in an eight-from-eight qualifying campaign, eight more than any other team in the world.
No one could have been prouder than the man who spent a career on the wrong side of Norwegian football’s near-misses.