July 24th
2023
on
13:57

12 hour drought target for Hegerberg

Ada Hegerberg has played over twelve hours in four different EC and WC finals since she scored the last goal. It doesn’t matter if only the team wins, says the huge Norwegian star.

– I put a lot of pressure on myself to play for Norway. This is very important for me personally. “All I want is to be successful with this team and I am preparing myself to be the best I can to serve the team,” he told a news conference Monday.

That was his initial response to an AP reporter’s question about whether he was feeling the pressure because it had been eight years since he scored in a playoff game. It was a double against Ivory Coast in the 2015 WC final group game in Canada.

Hegerberg has been one of the world’s best strikers for a decade, and he scored 43 goals in 77 internationals for Norway, but after he helped the national team to the final of the European Championship in 2013 (aged 18) and to the last 16 of the World Cup a year then, his experience in the championship was less than pleasant. In eight straight playoff games, he has gone off without scoring, and Norway have lost seven of those games:

* World Cup 2015: England 1-2

* EC 2017: Netherlands 0-1, Belgium 0-2, Denmark 0-1

* EC 2022: Northern Ireland 4-1, England 0-8, Austria 0-1

* WC 2023: New Zealand 0-1

In total, he has played 733 minutes plus added time in the playoffs since his last goal, in the 62nd minute against Ivory Coast in Moncton on 15 June 2015.

Hegerberg took a break from national team play for almost five years after the EC play-offs in 2017, but due to the pandemic he has only missed one play-off in that time: the World Cup in France in 2019, where Norway reached the quarter-finals. -finals.

He made a convincing comeback with a hat-trick against Kosovo in last April’s World Cup qualifier, but has only scored two more goals in the ten internationals he has played since then.

(NTB/NRK)