Haaland Scores Twice as Norway Beat Iraq on World Cup Return
Norway waited 28 years to bring Erling Haaland to a World Cup. He needed 29 minutes to justify it, scoring twice in a 4-1 win over Iraq in Boston.
Erling Haaland needed 29 minutes of his first World Cup match to remind everyone why Norway waited 28 years to bring him to one. The Manchester City striker scored twice as Norway powered past Iraq 4-1 in their Group I opener in Boston on Tuesday, the country's first goals at the tournament since the side that famously beat Brazil in 1998.
It was Haaland's debut at a major international tournament, the odd gap in a career that has flattened records at club level. He filled it quickly.
The opener came down Norway's left. Antonio Nusa's run pulled Iraq apart and released David Moller Wolfe, whose low cross Haaland stretched to steer in. Iraq answered within 10 minutes, Amir Alammari clipping a ball into the box for Aymen Hussein to power a header past Orjan Nyland.
Then Iraq handed the lead straight back. Goalkeeper Jalal Hassan dawdled over a soft back pass, and his attempted clearance cannoned off Haaland's shin and rolled in. Scruffy, and it counted. That second goal took Haaland to 57 international goals in just 51 games, the kind of ratio that has scoring records nervous wherever he plays. His tournament also opens a week after Lionel Messi tied the World Cup's all-time scoring record.
Coach Stale Solbakken, who was in that 1998 squad, had predicted Haaland would make a very big impact
at his first major finals. Substitute Leo Ostigard headed in Martin Odegaard's corner on 76 minutes to settle it, and deep into stoppage time Haaland's looping header back across goal deflected off Hussein for an own goal that made the scoreline kinder to Norway than the game had been.
The win put Norway top of Group I on goal difference, level on three points with France, who had beaten Senegal 3-1 earlier in the day behind a Kylian Mbappe brace. The two meet in New Jersey on 22 June in what already looks like the group's decider.
No team travelled a harder road here than Iraq, who clinched the 48th and final place in March after a 21-match qualifying campaign spread across 867 days. Their reward was a return to the World Cup for the first time since 1986, and a blunt reminder of how unforgiving it is: they lost all three games on their only previous appearance, and the two goalkeeping lapses will sting in a tournament that has already seen Cape Verde hold Spain.
For Haaland the timing could hardly be better. A 48-team World Cup played mostly on United States soil hands the Premier League's most marketable goalscorer a continent-sized shop window, the sort sponsors have been circling for years. Norway's golden generation, built around Haaland and Arsenal's Odegaard, finally has somewhere to spend it. Beat France on 22 June and the story stops being a 28-year wait and starts being how far this team can go.
