Norway and England kick off at 5 PM ET tonight at Hard Rock Stadium, and I will tell you right now that I have a bad feeling about this — not for Norway, for England.
We already wrote about this matchup when it came together. But now that it’s actually here, the feeling has gotten worse. Seven goals. Erling Haaland has scored seven goals in this World Cup — the most of anyone in this tournament, outpacing Messi and Mbappé combined — and he’s doing it in a style that doesn’t feel like a hot streak. It feels like weather. Like something that was always going to happen and cannot be stopped by anything England’s backline is capable of doing.
My grandmother has watched Napoli for forty years. She has seen great strikers come and go. What I keep thinking about is something she once said about Ronaldo — the Brazilian one — which is that the great ones don’t just score goals, they make the defense play wrong before they even touch the ball. That’s Haaland right now. His seven goals aren’t a number so much as a symptom: defenders are making choices against him that they know are bad choices, because the alternative is worse. He bends the geometry of the whole shape. England has to account for him on every possession, and that accounting is what opens up everything else for Norway.
He knocked Brazil out of this tournament with a brace in the Round of 16. Brazil. The Norway that everyone expected to be a nice story ending in the group stage is in a World Cup quarterfinal for the first time in their history, and Haaland is the reason in the same way that gravity is the reason things fall.
England fans have been trained — by penalty shootouts, by Gareth Southgate’s entire tenure, by seventy years of near-misses — to recognize what the moment smells like before it arrives. This is what it smells like.
Now, the honest counterargument: England is the slight favorite at -105, and that’s not nothing. Bellingham’s been brilliant — five goal involvements, two goals at the Azteca against Mexico in the span of ninety-eight seconds, the kind of run that gets compared to Diego Maradona because the comparison is actually warranted. England averages over two goals per game in this tournament and has kept two clean sheets in their last five. Norway has not kept a single one. Haaland himself said Norway’s chances are “really low,” which is either genuine humility or the most effective psychological move of the tournament (it’s the second one).
England can win this game. That’s not the point.
The point is that there is a player on the other side who doesn’t lose to game plans. England needs a stopper tonight and doesn’t have one. They need someone who has faced a striker who operates like a natural law, and nobody has. Haaland had the audacity to say he’d put pressure on himself if he weren’t Haaland — a sentence that only makes sense if you are, in fact, Haaland.
Meanwhile, in a twist I genuinely did not see coming, all of Mexico has adopted Norway as their surrogate team. Mexican fans eliminated from the tournament have been doing the Viking Row chant with banda music underneath it.
https://twitter.com/AllFutbolMX/status/2075682424357339393
ESPNmx posted that “Haaland will avenge the Mexicans against England.” The whole world has lost its mind for this guy, and honestly, same.
England is favored. England has Bellingham. England scores goals. None of that is going to feel like enough when it’s the eighty-fifth minute and the ball is at Haaland’s feet at Hard Rock Stadium.
I’ve been wrong before. But the universe picks its instruments carefully, and Erling Haaland is exactly the kind of instrument it would choose for tonight.
