Lyn vs Åsane - Pride Needs an Occasion

This summer, Norway finally played a men's World Cup, sending the country into a month-long state of ecstasy. Viking and Bodø/Glimt will both play Champions League football this autumn, the first time two Norwegian clubs have been in the competition proper in the same season.

Which makes it strange to be standing in a bar in Bergen at five in the afternoon, three deep at the counter, singing about the eleventh-placed team in the second tier.

On 26 August, Lyn, the traditional club from the west side of Oslo, came to play away at Åsane Arena. Far-travelled supporters and Oslo diaspora who happen to live here now huddled together at the Metz bar before kick-off, wearing red and white and chanting before anyone had finished a first beer. We have supported Lyn since our childhoods and make no claim to neutrality. What neither of us could figure out was why so many of the others had come.

Where we come from

For over two decades Norwegian men's football was defined by what it wasn't. No major tournament after Euro 2000. Little to no representation in Europe. Eliteserien crowds dwindling. 

Our generation grew up with a national team that lost at home to Belarus in front of an empty Ullevaal. Even as kids with outsized imaginations, none of us could have dreamed of what took place in America this summer.

Twenty-eight years after our last World Cup appearance, Haaland scored twice in the last eleven minutes against Brazil and put us into the quarter-finals for the first time in history. Over a hundred thousand took to the streets of Karl Johan to celebrate the victory. When England knocked us out a week later, the street filled again anyway, in the rain, for a team that had lost.

It would be easy to say the football did it. But one of our mothers can name maybe two positions on the field. She stayed up for kick-offs at two in the morning. When we went out a week later, she took the train into the city centre for a parade for a team that had just been knocked out.

Nothing about the sport changed this summer. What changed was that it finally handed Norway a ticket into the biggest event in the world. For a month, a country of five million had the extensive and almost entirely positive attention of an audience of billions.

What it leaves behind

A summer like that leaves a residue. Our global recognition validated our pre-existing pride and patriotism. Together, these feelings create long-lasting memories that are addictive, and that people want to relive.

What the Åsane away game showed us is that you don't have to leave football to find it. Even in a ground of a few thousand, in a city that isn't yours, a smaller version of the same magic is available.

Nobody at Metz knew each other through Lyn. They knew each other through Oslo, and the club was the pretext that made showing up acceptable. Half the room could not have named the starting eleven, which made no difference at all to how loudly they sang. There were old shirts from the years when Lyn was still a top-flight club, and scarves that had obviously been dug out of a parents' loft that summer.

The bankruptcy in 2010 sent one of Norway's oldest clubs down to the fifth tier, and it took thirteen seasons to climb back to the OBOS-league. The fans put it more economically:

«Tretten år i gjørma, med samme lidenskap» — Thirteen years in the mud, with the same passion.

Through all of it, the supporter club Bastionen stayed. That story is already well known. A story we didn't know was standing right next to us.

She had grown up in Nordberg, right next to Lyn's training ground, and had rarely been to a football match, let alone a Lyn game. Had the fixture fallen before the summer, she told us, she probably wouldn't have come.

We suspect she's closer to the average football fan than we are — a group for whom the sport is a way of saying where you're from and who you're with. That would explain why football is the world's game rather than merely a popular one, and why the countries that love it most tend to be the ones that have used it hardest to be seen. Nobody thinks Brazil's following is built on tactical curiosity.

What has changed in Norway is that we now have this too. The sport used to belong to the people who liked watching it played. This summer it stopped being theirs alone, with the woman from Nordberg and the meet-up at Metz being the proof.

The game

After a trip up with bus 4, we stood for ninety minutes and sang through most of them.

Thirteen minutes in, 18-year-old Solstad-Nøis worked the ball into the box, the keeper pushed out Kallevåg's shot, and Mathias Johansen put away the rebound. The hundred of us lost it. Six minutes before half-time Kallevåg got the second himself, teed up by Johansen. A former Åsane player scoring against his old club. The kind of thing you can sing about forever.

Two-nil at the break felt like more than it was. Anyone who has followed Lyn for any length of time knows better. With two minutes of normal time left, Tobias Luggenes Furebotn pulled one back and the ground woke up. Åsane threw everything at what was left and the added time on top of it. It stayed 2-1. Lyn won.

The walk back

By October few will remember the specifics of this game. What the hundred of us actually did that Wednesday was say where we were from. In Bergen we are students, which is a category with an expiry date, and being from Oslo is so common here that it barely registers. For an afternoon, however, our club was a marker we could wear that nobody objected to.

Pride needs an occasion. Football supplies one on a schedule, and fills the room with other people who came for the same reason. This summer that occasion was the largest one there is. In late August it was a Wednesday at Åsane Arena, with only a hundred of us.