It must hurt when little brother Norway becomes big brother
Dear Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard,
Now it has happened. The scenario that you were asked about in a recent interview, about who you are doing if Sweden goes out of the World Cup. “Not Norway anyway”, you then replied. “Colombia maybe”.
Do you think a Norwegian foreign minister would have said the same thing if it concerned you?
Or that your colleague in Denmark had done it?
No, Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen has posted a tribute to the Norwegian national team. The large daily newspaper Politiken “rows for Norway”.
Perhaps I should have been magnanimous enough to let this depend. But the thing is that we Norwegians have always looked up to you. I remember the long summer of 1994. After we went out of the World Cup, it was only Sweden that mattered to us. The fantastic team with Ravelli in goal, with Swedish concrete in the defense and midfield, and the attack with brolin, Dahlin and Kenneth Andersson.
You also had the best song of the WC. We knew it by heart. “When we dig for gold in the USA” wasn’t all Norwegian pop music. Supercatchy, intelligent and easy, a symbol of a music industry that had been rolling out global hits for decades. On the other side of the national border, we were in the pop culture stone age.
You were one old European power that had tried to invade Russia (not recommended, but respect!) – we had spent hundreds of years as a distant colony. Of course, the countries were also similar – the languages are similar and we both spent the 20th century building a welfare state and public homes.
But we came from the coast, the fjords and the rivers. Our ancestors were fish farmers and sailors. You had the great power history, the nobility and a confident bourgeoisie that created industry and banking – and an urban culture. We traveled wide-eyed to Stockholm. Everything was bigger there, the people more elegant, the neighborhoods more sophisticated and continental. Sometimes you smiled at us (and because of us) in the way that those in the capitals of empires can sometimes allow themselves to be amused by “the noble savages”.
My God, how you have crushed us in sports. tennis stars, Ingemar Stenmark, Gunde Swanthe national handball team, the national hockey team. Football history was in a completely different division. You organized the WC and made it to the final against Pelé’s Brazil in 1958. IFK Gothenburg won the European Cup twice in the 1980s.
You had Björn Borg – we had some rowers and some big aces on skates.
But like everyone little brothers with a successful and swarming older brother, we kept track. We saw what you did wrong, and where there was room for improvement. First we started to beat you in winter sports, in cross-country skiing and alpine skiing. After that in handball, tennis, athletics (congratulations Mondo Duplantisbut we have two at his level) and now incredibly in hockey.
As painful as that must have been to hear Peter Northug these Sweden, you still had football. You may not have had the best national team in the world, but you were a solid 4-4-2 team with dangerous strikers that reached the quarter-finals of the championships.
In the meantime, Norway had become a nouveau riche little brother and the small provincial city of Oslo had grown thanks to every bit of oil money and cheap Swedish labour.
If nothing else, we were miserable at football. As the crucial qualifying matches approached, we trembled with fear and suffered embarrassing losses each time.
Until we don’t made it longer. Until the national team coach Steel Solbakkenraised with Swedish television and culture in Grue, not far from the Swedish border, found the magic key. Where he combined the best of Swedish-Nordic defensive team-building culture with an offensive punch that surpasses anything the Nordics have achieved since Gre-No-Li ravaged the Scudetto in Italy in the 50s and the Danish dynamite in the 80s.
Like it or not, but Martin Ødegaard is an updated version of Thomas Brolin and Jonas Thern in the same football player. Nusa, Bob and Schjelderup has a register and a potential which Freddie Ljungberg and Henke Larsson could hardly have matched even in their glory days. Erling Haaland is a striker who excels Zlatan. Perhaps not in bragging about himself and goal cavalcades on Youtube.
But the numbers are clear: Haaland already has more goals in the Champions League. He has a higher average in the top leagues. At national team level, Zlatan has scored 62 goals. Haaland has scored 60. With 69 fewer international matches.
“Yes, it certainly hurts when buds break,” wrote the Swedish poet Karin Boye. Yes, it certainly hurts when the uncool little brother comes to the Nordic family gathering with money, self-confidence and a fame that big brother once thought was reserved for him. Then it is easy to mock him for “rowing” and for “trying too hard”, as many Swedes do on the internet these days.
But you should know one thing. Although we like to make fun of you for your political correctness, German order, and the fact that pole vaulting and table tennis will soon be the only events in which you beat us, we still love and admire you. Like all little brothers who win the world’s favor, there’s really only one thing we’re really looking for, and that’s Big Brother’s recognition.
Aslak Nore is a writer. His latest book is “Det arctica arvet” (Norstedts 2024).
Translation: Sanna Samuelsson
This text has previously been published in VG.
https://www.vg.no/sport/i/5pRxRW/naar-lillebror-blir-bigbror
