Inside Story: Iceland football comes out of the cold

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • WhatsApp
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • A footballing fairytale will continue on Tuesday when Iceland kick-off their Euro 2016 campaign. Taking on superstar forward Cristiano Ronaldo and his Portugal team-mates will mark the culmination of more than a decade’s worth of comprehensive work for the Scandinavians.

    With it, the arrival of the smallest nation ever to reach a major tournament, and first to do so with a population under one million, will be confirmed. No longer will people think of the rock-strewn Arctic outpost and conjure only images of puffins, pumped up strong men and esoteric musicians such as Bjork and Sigur Ros.

    Sporting achievement, on a grand scale, will now be added to the list.

    Celebrated son Eidur Gudjohnsen once carried out a lonely fight as the outstanding footballing figure in a country of just over 330,000 people and not one professional team. Now, the ex-Barcelona and Chelsea forward is the elder statesman providing avuncular advice to a talented crop which has risen like an iconic geysir gushing steam.

    But make no mistake, the path to Stade Geoffroy-Guichard has been by design and not fortune, no matter how incredible progression felt for the talisman striker.

    “It has been quite amazing,” the 37-year-old veteran tells Sport360. “It feels like a completely new chapter for us.

    “We started this journey just under four years ago, when we had a great campaign for World Cup 2014, which we missed out through the play-offs. The whole atmosphere around the country and team is completely different. We always raised a few eyebrows sometimes, but this is first time we’ve found consistency for a long period.”

    Players like striker Alfred Finnbogason (l) represent Iceland’s new era.

    Players like striker Alfred Finnbogason (l) represent Iceland’s new era.

    To cast Iceland as rank outsiders does not nearly fully justify the phrase. This is a country which possesses no discernible footballing pedigree and where Gudjohnsen’s spells at two of Europe’s biggest clubs stand out by a distance to the sides such as Anderlecht, his father Arnor played for, or the Portsmouth team with which defender Hermann Hreidarsson lifted the FA Cup in 2008.

    As recently as 2010, they were ranked 112 in the world by FIFA. At the front of this pursuit to turn the mundane into the miraculous is co-head-coach Heimir Hallgrimsson – a fascinating individual himself who combines elite-level management with an ongoing career in dentistry.

    Alongside the vastly experienced Swede Lars Lagerback, who will retire at the end of Euro 2016 with Hallgrimsson assuming full control, the first Icelandic man to earn the UEFA Pro Licence has been on an extraordinary journey which has seen the tiny nation build on play-off defeat to Croatia in their bid to reach World Cup 2014.

    That near miss evolved into securing a spot in France with two games to spare, with notable wins home and away against the Netherlands a hallmark of their outstanding achievement.

    “When I was a player, I was never at national team standard,” Hallgrimsson, 49, explains. “You tried to be outside on a gravel pitch in the winter time and that is why only the toughest survived.

    “It was more or less doing just athletic work, running or weightlifting. Just a small part of the year we trained football. For these kids now, it is totally different.“

    As the nation with the most chess grand masters per capita, it is no surprise to see an intelligent approach was made to solving Iceland’s sporting problem.

    The harsh winter climate, which rules out play for a large portion of the year, and mountainous terrain has been a serious restriction for developing talented footballers. After all, it is hard to create technical wizards like Lionel Messi when gale-force winds and bumpy pitches inhibit all attempts to control a ball.

    To tackle the problem, Iceland looked to Norway as a blueprint, the Scandinavians’ investment during the early 1990s in full-size indoor pitches being duplicated nearly a decade later with the opening of the first such facility at Keflavik in 2000.

    Fast forward to today and a total of eight such facilities can be found, with hundreds of smaller all-weather pitches in place.

    Money and time was also spent training coaches, with 639 people now holding a UEFA B licence, according to recent KSI (Football Association of Iceland) statistics. To exemplify this, there is a UEFA-qualified coach for one in 500 people in Iceland and one in 5,000 in England.

    The worth of these changes came to light in 2011, as the nation’s bow at a major finals was made with entry into the European Under-21 Championship. With skills honed at venues like Keflavik, the likes of Swansea City attacking midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson have come to be known as the ‘Indoor Kids’.

    “If you talk about maybe 2002, we had one indoor arena where we could play games in the winter time,” Hallgrimsson says. “That of course is the disadvantage of Iceland, the winter time.

    “There is so much wind and it is cold. It makes it so hard to play football. Now, 15 years later we have eight full-sized indoor arenas.

    “We have so many artificial grass pitches and more than 100 mini, artificial pitches next to schools. Things have changed enormously and you can play football so easily, all year round. The other reason is the coaching education is fantastic. We did a survey which showed if you put your 10-year old through training, it was 80-percent likely the coach would, at least, have a UEFA B licence.”

    The emergence from the allweather pitches of talents such as Sigurdsson, Real Sociedad striker Alfred Finnbogason, captain Aron Gunnarsson of Cardiff City and Nantes forward Kolbeinn Sigþórsson has heralded a new era of achievement.

    Gudjohnsen was a man apart, leading the fight for a team whose greatest footballing feat was a 1-1 draw with France in 1998. Now, Euro 2016 feels just like the beginning.

    He says: “There is less pressure on me in the sense I am 37. It used to be if I didn’t produce something, it always felt like I hadn’t played a good game.

    “We were always a decent side, but we couldn’t find consistency. We have a generation of players who have come through at the same time, who make the core. What has changed significantly is now we are able to take our chances much easier than we used to.”

    Knitting all this together has been Lagerback. Hallgrimsson pays tribute to the man who previously led Sweden to five-consecutive championships and Nigeria at the 2010 World Cup.

    He says: “Lars had Sweden for so many years and took them to many finals. He has a formula which works to take a small team to finals. His experience and organisation helps us a lot. We are normally a nation of non-professional footballers.”

    Iceland still represent an unknown quantity this summer. But progression alongside Group F favourites Portugal cannot be discounted, especially when the opposition is fellow intriguing underdogs Austria and Hungary.

    “We haven’t set ourselves any targets,” says Gudjohnsen. “It is similar to going into the qualifiers, where the majority of games on paper looked very difficult.

    “We now believe we can win every game. It would be unfair to say we are going to win it, but we will give everything we can in every game and go as far as we deserve.”

    Recommended