In June 1995 a flight from Stockholm to Oslo was filled with a jubilant Norwegian sports team and a huge press corps conducting interviews and taking photographs. The undisputed star of the team was sitting with the World Cup Trophy, looking out at two fighter jets from the Norwegian Air Force giving them an honorary escort on its way to a large crowd of fans waiting at the airport in Oslo. The victorious athletes were the Norwegian Women’s Football team and the focus of attention was Hege Riise, who a day earlier had opened the scoring in the World Cup final against Germany with a great individual goal, and then been awarded the Golden Ball as the player of the tournament.
Riise's humble and shy exterior hid a woman whose love for the game and passion to play it had taken her from endless hours of repeatedly kicking a ball against her parent’s garage in the small farming community of Høland to become the world’s greatest female footballer. In those June days 16 years ago, she was the most talked about person in Norway. Never the fastest of players, Riise biggest force was her sublime technique and reading of the game, a great passer of the pall who would dictate the pace of every game she played.
She was an integral part of a team that manifested women’s football as one of the major sports in Norway. Part of that was the way they gave a country not used to team sport success a historic range of memorable successes. Norway’s Women football team became the first Norwegian team to win both a European (1987), World (1995) and Olympic (2000) team tournament. Riise, together with the centre-half Gro Espeseth and goalkeeper Bente Nordby are still the only footballers – regardless of sex – to have won all three tournaments.
The reason for Norway’s comparable bigger success in women’s football compared to the men’s team is a riposte to those who claim politics and sport don’t mix. One of the frontrunners in women’s rights and equality, the participation of women in a sport they for so long had been scandalously excluded from would always be more easily accepted in Norway. But even there the traditionalists held back, the NFF (Norwegian F.A.) refusing to grant official status to women’s football when diminutive steps of organisation was taking in the late 60s. It was a new youth tournament set up in 1972 that turned the tide. Norway Cup is today one of the world most famous and largest youth tournaments, and women’s football was present from the very beginning. The presence of girls and women playing in the fast growing tournament helped turn up the pressure on NFF, who in 1976 finally recognised the women’s game. The first official international was played two years later, Norway losing to Sweden by 2-1 (the men’s team had also lost their first game to the Swedes, but by a slightly more embarrassing 11-3 score line in 1908).
Today football is the biggest sport for women in Norway, its large and constant presence of everyday life for so many families across the country inevitable supporting the popularity of the sport on a national level and in the media. The major tournaments still attract a healthy interests among people who would not normally follow sport closely. That is not to say that women’s football is treated equally with the men’s game in Norway, with a lot less television and paper coverage of the women’s game, although still vastly superior to the pitiful and still often patronising attention given by the British press to its women footballers.
While still struggling to attract crowds to the domestic league and with a lack of the same high profile players as in Riise’s era, women footballers are still very much an accepted and integral part of the game in Norway. It can be seen in the little things, like how women footballers are in contention for the highest annual award given in Norwegian football, Kniksenprisen (Riise winning it in 1995), and in the wider context of playing a central part of the current NFF organisation. Karen Espelund was the governing body’s General Secretary for ten years from 1999, the first woman to hold such a prominent position within a domestic F.A. Another example is the status given to coaching the national women’s team The four coaches in charge between 1989 and 2009 had all both played and managed in the men’s top division in Norway. Per Matias Høgmo, who lead the team to Olympic Gold in Sydney in 2000, went on coach both the men’s U-21 national team and Rosenborg, and is currently in charge of Tromsø, one of the favourites for the men’s league championship this season. Høgmo will also be one of the front-runners for the men’s national team job when Egil Olsen steps down from the role.
At the same time, Norway’s women are going into the World Cup in Germany with their first ever female couch in charge. Eli Landsem has been one of the stalwarts of the women’s game throughout its modern history in Norway, getting her first cap as a 17 year old in 1979. She leads a team who has lost their dominant position in World football to Germany and Brazil, with other strong European challengers in England and Sweden . They have not won a tournament since Sydney, a loss to Germany in the final of the European Championship in 2005 their strongest performance in that period.
Norway have a great pedigree in the tournament, only once failing to reach the semi-finals. With the host nation Germany the huge favourites, the Norwegians belong to a group of teams including England, Brazil, USA and Sweden that will be the German’s main challengers. Norway have been drawn in Group D with Brazil, Australia and Equatorial Guinea, with a quarter-final against USA or Sweden the most likely award if they, as expected, qualify for the knock-out stage. Winning the group will also mean they almost certainly won’t face Germany before a potential final.
Norway lack the high-profile players from the championships winning teams of the nineties and have lost Lisa-Marie Woods, voted the best player in the top-flight last year, to a late injury. However, a good combination of experienced player s and young talent is complemented by a strong central line. Goalkeeper Ingrid Hjemseth is one of the best players in the world in the most, often unfairly, maligned position in women’s football. The versatile centre-half Trine Rønning has 113 caps, nine more than the team’s captain, Ingvild Stensland, a midfielder currently playing for perhaps the world’s best league club, Olympique Lyonnais. The goals are expected to come from the younger players. 22 year old Elise Thorsnes have scored 84 games in 119 league games, while Isabell Herlovsen, also 22, already has 19 goals in 64 games for Norway, getting her first cap at the age of 16. Cecile Pedersen is still only 20, but eight goals in her first 21 caps indicates that she can become one of the breakthrough talents of the tournament.
With Germany’s dominant position combined with being the host nation, nobody expects Norway to emulate the team from 1995, and for one of its players to gain the recognition Hege Riise so deservedly was given. But the women’s game does need a morale booster and a run to the final might well reignite some of the passion and interest in team. Women’s sport has a much wider presence in Norway than in most other countries, with a special affection reserved in the national consciousness for its football and handball teams, who have provided so many memorable and historic achievements. From a position of relative low expectations, that love affair might well blossom up again this summer.
Highlights from the five previous women’s World Cup Finals here (Hege Riise’s opening goal coming after 30 seconds)
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