Depending on your exact preference in these matters it may or may not be hard to decide who is the most talented 22-year-old Norwegian in the sporting world right now. At least until next Monday.
I was checking Erling Haaland’s age after he scored that late winner for Manchester City against his former club Borussia Dortmund in Wednesday night’s Champions League. Haaland turned 22 on July 21st, and is probably well on his way to setting another age-group record of some sort as I type.
Training with Bryne FC Under-19s at age 14, scoring from the halfway line at 15, then with Salzburg FC, the first teenager to score in five consecutive Champions League matches, then in the 2019 under-20 World Cup scoring a record nine goals in a single match, etc.
His City manager Pep Guardiola said his acrobatic goal against Dortmund – exquisitely set up by João Cancelo – evoked memories of Johan Cruyff, who in his own lasting memory scored a similar goal for Barcelona against Atlético Madrid way back when.
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It was certainly something of a genius move, at least in the ability to see it coming. Or what German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer always said separates talent from genius in the first place, that while talent may achieve what others can’t achieve, genius achieves what others can’t imagine.
Or as Schopenhauer also put it, talent is like the marksman who hits a target others can’t reach, while genius is like the marksman who hits a target others can’t even see.
“I think it is his nature, he is elastic, he is flexible, and after that he has the ability to make the contact and put the ball in the net,” said Guardiola. “I think his mum and dad give him that flexibility.”
You know what they say about choosing your parents wisely: his father Alfie is the former Nottingham Forest, Leeds (where Erling was born) and Manchester City defender, his mother Gry Marita Braut is a former Norwegian champion in the heptathlon.
It seems his father was also keen the young Erling try out a few other sports while he could, which he did: handball, cross-county skiing, athletics, reportedly setting a world record for the longest standing long jump for a five-year-old, 1.63 metres, in 2006.
But once he started in the academy of his hometown club Bryne at age five every other sport was left behind, as well it might. Early specialisation in sport may not come recommended, but still it’s the key to winning anything major.
Jakob Ingebrigtsen is the other Norwegian in this sporting realm, the Olympic 1,500m champion who turns 22 next Monday. Like Haaland, he dabbled in some other sports as a very young kid, namely cross-country skiing, before early specialisation became the key to his success too.
“And then there is Jakob. When he was around 11, he told me, ‘I want to be the best runner in the world’. He’d already worked it all out in his mind. And since that day, he’s never wavered.”
Gjert Ingebrigtsen has told this story before, more than once, never wavering in his own belief either that Jakob, the second youngest of his six sons, would someday become exactly that, the best runner in the world.
So it came to pass on that Saturday evening in August last year, inside that virtually empty Olympic Stadium, the gold medal in the men’s 1,500m was won by Ingebrigtsen, then aged 20 years and 11 months. The first Norwegian to win the old blue-riband event, the second youngest winner ever, it was also among the most flawlessly executed races in Olympic history.
Before the World Championships in Oregon in July, Ingebrigtsen did a quite startling and lengthy interview with the New York Times, talking about what it takes to succeed at his level of distance running. “I’m always waiting for something and always training for something,” he said. “My life is basically a waiting game.”
“If people manage to study at training camp while they are also doing two sessions a day, they’re not training as they should be. You have to sleep and then be doing something brain-dead to keep yourself prepared for the next session.”
Whether this is a healthy obsession or not, no matter what age, who really knows. Ingebrigtsen was just 17 when he won a European Championship senior double gold over 1,500m/5,000m, the first in 84 years of championship history.
“I’ve been a professional runner since I was eight, nine, 10 years old,” he said then, in no way overawed by his own genius, and repeating the feat in Munich last month, still only 21.
Ingebrigtsen didn’t quite pull off a similar double in Oregon, beaten in the 1,500m by Britain’s Jake Wightman, describing that experience as “losing to an inferior athlete”.
Still it’s impossible to see why Ingebrigtsen won’t win a whole lot more, same as Carlos Alcaraz, the young Spaniard who won the US Open in tennis last weekend – with that becoming the youngest ever men’s world number one at 19 years, four months and six days old.
Alcaraz is also the first teenager in the Open-era to top the men’s rankings, going back to 1973, and there’s no denying the talent and genius and acrobatic ease with which he plays his game.
By all accounts Alcaraz has known little else other than the game of tennis, and there was a reminder of that too among the plaudits for Roger Federer this week, remembering Wimbledon 2001, when as a 19-year-old he beat Pete Sampras in the fourth round, before winning outright in 2003 aged 21, already with that sense of “at last”.
Still it’s often a disputed topic, and perhaps why there was some divided opinion around Christopher Atherton, who at 13 years and 329 days old, came on as a second-half substitute in a Northern Ireland League Cup game for Glenavon against Dollingstown on Tuesday.
In doing so Atherton broke the UK record for the youngest player to appear in a senior football match. For some he was dangerously young, the club irresponsible in even considering his appearance, while for others fresh evidence perhaps that early specialisation is still the key to winning anything major. Just another young player trying to mark that distance between talent and genius.
