Fjordball Has A New Home!

After almost a year of faithful service fjordball-towers, like a loyal but aging fullback, is being abandoned. The portraits of Raymond Kvisvik have all been taken down, the last Bengt Eriksen-shaped piñata has been hacked to bits and the bust of Otto Ulseth has been decimated for the last time.


In an exciting new move, fjordball has merged with the mighty Football in Finland and become Nordic Football News.


So update yer bookmarks and lock up yer daughters, as NFN will now be your primary source for all things pertaining to Norwegian and Nordic football. Articles, interviews and match-reports, wether you just want to know what's going on or you're looking to do some football betting off the beaten track, NFN will have it covered.

<- http://www.nordicfootball.info ->

It's All Gone A Bit Strange At Fredrikstad

Fredrikstad. A grand old club with 9 league titles and 11 cup wins to their name, who got relegated in 1984 and spent 18 years in the unsettling wilderness of the Norwegian lower divisions before returning to the big-time in 2003. Since then they've won a cup, built a shiny new ground and gradually made themselves a force in the league again, as last season's runners-up finish clearly shows. In 2009 they face a fork in the road: The contracts of nine of their players as well as their manager expire at the end of this season. This fall they hired Tor-Kristian Karlsen, a renowned talent-scout with considerable experience from behind the scenes of European clubs, as their sporting director with the idea of letting one of Norway's most competent young football-men modernize the club and use their current success as a platform to take club forwards. Karlsen went about his work, his abilities in the transfer-market being brought to bare with the shock-singing of Costa Rican midfielder Celso Borges, and he started planning a bright new future for Fredrikstad. It all looked so perfect.

You can imagine then that it rated about a 9,5 on NFN's WTF-o-meter when one of Norway's largest tabloids reported a few days ago that there was serious unrest in the Fredrikstad-camp, and a few hours later the club held a press-conference where they explained that Tor-Kristian Karlsen had resigned. Just how did that happen?

The Norwegian press has reported it as a personal conflict between Karlsen and Anders Grönhagen, the club's Swedish manager who orchestrated last season's remarkable silver medal in the league, though this depiction only partly accurate.

In the aftermath of Karlsen's resignation it becomes clear that yes, him and Grönhagen were incompatible: "We are two different types of persons who have very different approaches to how a football club should be run," Karlsen told local newspaper Fredrikstad Blad. Reportedly he wanted the club to focus on youth development while Grönhagen represented a more short-term, results-orientated view. While there's no evidence for this, it's not an unreasonable assumption to say that these differing views would have clashed badly on the subject of contract re-negotiations.

In an attempt to simplify the situation Fredrikstad's chief executive Runar W. Henriksen told TV2 that "Karlsen chose to resign after a meeting we had. He chose to resign because we didn't agree with his plans", a statement which cuts to the heart of the problem in ways Henriksen himself probably isn't aware of: You don't hire a sporting director and then undermine his plans for the club, it's the administrative equivalent of the board deciding on the team-selection. As Karlsen himself told Fredrikstad Blad: "I'm no longer at FFK because the board didn't back me up on the plans I was hired to implement".

Grönhagen for his part has been rather two-faced in this situation, which will surprise many since the Swede expertly cultivated a sort of sympathetic old uncle-image through the press last season. "There's no power-struggle," he told Norwegian tabloid VG. "I had act, or it would all have gone to hell", he told Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. Make of that what you will.

What it all boils down to is this: Having hired Tor-Kristian Karlsen this fall to lead the club to a bright new future, the Fredrikstad board flinched when it turned out that backing their man and his vision for the club meant parting company with a manager who has made himself very popular with the public, and like most football executives the idea of making themselves unpopular with the public didn't really appeal to them.

As dust settles around the situation, what remains is a Fredrikstad board with very little credibility and a manager who isn't quite the benevolent uncle people thought he was. And Grönhagen will now be under serious pressure to get results, as the club have effectively exchanged their long-term vision in favor of his short-term ambition.

Back to the Stoneage for Norway as Olsen Gets the Gig

There's an old football-adage that says once you've been successful somewhere you should never go back, but then again it shouldn't surprise anyone that a pragmatic, scientific man like Egil "Drillo" Olsen doesn't put much stock into such things. Yes, in an unexpected and slightly bizarre turn of events, the 66 year old wellie-wearing weirdo is back in charge of the Norwegian national team.

Egil Olsen wants YOU (to play a 70-yard diagonal pass to a freakishly tall winger)

After failing to secure the services of any of their preferred top targets, the Norwegian football association has given the job temporarily to Egil "Drillo" Olsen, the man who previously guided the team to consecutive world cups in 1994 and 1998. He has been hired primarily for the three upcoming friendlies against Germany, South Africa and Finland, but unless the association's first choice for the long-term appointment (widely assumed to be Fc Copenhagen manager Ståle Solbakken) becomes available, chances are the 66 year old tactician will be in charge for the rest of the Wold Cup qualifying-campaign. 

The appointment has been meet with a positive reaction by Norwegians, fueled largely by nostalgia for those glory nights of the 90ties and a distinct feeling that after the disastrous year that was 2008 then it certainly can't get any worse. After a full calendar year without a win, one can easily forgive Norwegians for giving up on the idea of sexy football and just going with whatever might get them a result now and then. Media-reaction has also been largely positive, with Drillo's former disciples (most of whom now manage or work behind the scenes at various Tippeliga and Adeccoliga clubs) virtually queuing up to sing his praises and few other pundits having the cojones to go against the tide of public opinion.

A few have had the audacity to break ranks and criticise the appointment, most notably Aalesund-manager Kjetil Rekdal, who stuck his head out of the trench and told the media that re-hiring Drillo is a step in the wrong direction, that times have changed since the 90ties and that the people in charge of hiring a new manager are all incompetent. Which is all probably true, but desperate times call for desperate measures, and it appears that the Norwegian people are quite content with turning into the international version of Bolton Wanderers if it means putting a few wins on the board.

The decision to go back to Drillo is bizarre to say the least, as the hiring of Hareide in 2004 was supposed to mark a shift in direction for Norwegian football: Defensive long-ball thuggery wasn't seen as the way forward and even though it would probably mean less impressive results the federation wanted a national team that looked like it could string a few passes together. The hiring of Drillo for the short-term (and the assumed hiring of Solbakken for the long-term) indicates a return to the days of continually hoofing the ball forwards, the kind of football which famously caused midfield-magician Erik Mykland to retire from international football because his neck hurt from watching balls fly over his head. It's a remarkable u-turn, and one which probably wouldn't have been quite so welcome in the eyes of the public if they weren't quite so blinded by the horrific results of 2008. 

At any rate, it will certainly be interesting to see how Drillo, once a member of the now disbanded Norwegian Communist Party, deals with the bloated ego's of today's multimillionaire footballers, and how his footballing philosophies hold up in 2009. If nothing else, there are plenty of questions that will be answered one way or the other this coming season, and for Drillo, one of Åge Hareide's most vocal critics in these last couple of years, it's time to put his money where his mouth has been.