JUST after Erling Haaland's second goal against Brazil, thumped home from just beyond the box, he removed his ponytail and let his long mane flow. It's something he seldom does in a match, but there's something powerful behind it. In Nordic culture, hair symbolises freedom and power. After that second goal, his golden hair flew in the East Rutherford breeze. It was to show the world that a warrior was back home following a successful mission.
On the evidence of his performance, and the way Norway executed their game plan to a T against the five-time champions, who's to say they won't be back in East Rutherford for the final on July 19?
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Norway has a lot going for it in terms of tourist destinations. There's the Northern Lights, the Insta-worthy fjords,and picturesque coastlines. Over the last four years, though, a small town in the middle of nowhere has made a name for itself. It's so small, you wouldn't be able to mark it on a map but Bryne (population 12000) was the place where Haaland did his schooling. It's also where he first started playing senior football. It didn't matter that he didn't score a goal in the second division in his first season (he was still a child then), but the coaches saw something different in him, even back then. He would be there, either working on his finishing or his heading or his crossing from the wing. Morning, noon, evening, holidays. He always wanted to improve.
It's hard to believe that during his younger days he actually missed several growth spurts, but the coaches at Bryne kept promoting him because of his appetite and attitude. It's how he started competing against players older and physically stronger than him. And because he was smaller than a lot of the defenders he used to face, he developed a preternatural ability to be at the right place at the right time. When this daily visited his first club in 2025, one of his youth coaches told the story of how 'the skinny boy had to be clever to get it into the right position to score goals'. Espen Undheim remembered how Haaland used to get livid with himself if he finished games with just one goal to his name. 'He thought he could have scored four or five."
These days, Bryne couldn't be prouder of what their son has become. There's even an 'Erling Haaland Stadium Tour' to attract tourists into their neck of the woods. To complete the experience, one of the shops next to the club even sells 'raw milk', something Haaland swears by even today (curiously, the Norwegian has been denied raw milk in the US as it's banned).
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That knack of goalscoring is what has made him the best No. 9 in the game today. And a No. 9 in the purest sense of the phrase. He doesn't get involved in the build-up phase; he's happy to be anonymous for 80 minutes, but as long as he gets service, he's deadly. A ruthless killer. At the World Cup in the US, he has already scored all kinds of goals. First-time finishes, break-away goals, headers and shots from outside the box. He's not aesthetically pleasing like Lionel Messi, nor is he an all-action forward like Kylian Mbappe.
But he doesn't need to be either of them. He's blessed with a different set of attributes: pace, physicality, heading ability, and first-time finishing. Man City now play to Haaland's strengths to get the best out of him. Norway also play to his strengths to get the best out of their generational attacker; It's how he has scored seven goals to be level with Mbappe and Messi at this World Cup.
Zoom out the lens a bit, and you will realise that Norway is built to maximise his strengths. His streak for them now stands at 14 games and 27 goals. What he has done at the World Cup may be a surprise to him — he wore a sheepish grin on his face after his brace condemned the sport's most famous win to their earlier World Cup exit this century — but this is really what he does. Scores goals.
If his second goal was the one that settled the matter, his first had a feeling of familiarity attached to it.
His battle with Gabriel Magalhaes was always going to play an important role in the outcome of the match, and the way the Norwegian anticipated the cross, jumped and beat Magalhaes to the header really helped set the tone for the rest of the contest. It's something fans of the Premier League have seen several times; the forward beating the marker by a fraction of a second to bury the header thanks to a big leap.
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The 25-year-old may not show it outwardly but he cares deeply about his Norwegian identity. Before coming to the tournament, he loved dressing as a Viking along with his colleagues on an island in Norway. On the back of the jersey while playing for his country, his name is 'Braut Haaland'. Braut is the surname of his mother (a former international heptathlete), and Haaland has been using it as a means to preserve both sides of a family's identity. Earlier this year, he spent over $120000 to buy the only remaining copy of a 15th-century book about the Vikings and their history before donating it to a library in Bryne for public use.
A 1000 years from now, there will be an entire chapter dedicated to Haaland and his goalscoring exploits in the summer of 2026 when their football team dethroned the original Gods of the game on a Sunday evening.
