Oslo (AFP) – She first took to the pitch as a pesky little girl who followed her big sister everywhere. Today she is the top female footballer in the world, crowned with the first women’s Ballon d’Or.
Ada Hegerberg has captivated the football world, a “serial scorer” averaging almost 1.3 goals per match with her French team Olympique Lyonnais.
Hegerberg comes from a footballing family and used to watch her older sister and brother.
“Ada was the type to sabotage Andrine and their brother Silas’s trainings until she was maybe seven or eight years old,” recalls their mother, Gerd Stolsmo, in the family flat in the east of Oslo.
“Then she went to a tournament. And there … she was passed the ball, turned around, made a beeline for the goal, and scored. Again and again and again. Match after match. That was when it became so obvious,” Gerd says.
At the time the football obsessed Hegerbergs were living in Sunndalsora, a sparsely populated town at the end of a fjord on the west coast of Norway.
– Focus on football –
The Hegerberg sisters were such talented players that they allowed to join the local boys’ teams.
In addition to team practices, the family would happily hold extra training sessions together. Nothing was ever left to chance.
On top of that, without her parents’ knowledge, the two girls would rise early in the mornings to run in the wooded hills before school.
Ada’s father Stein Erik Hegerberg is obsessed with details believing even a hair out of place can cost a player precious hundredths of a second on the field
“Once you start, you have to be sure that everything is all set,” he said. “The balls are properly inflated, shoes are polished with the laces well knotted and the hair tied back.”
To allow the children to focus on football, the Hegerbergs moved closer to Oslo.
Like Andrine, Ada joined Kolbotn, one of the top women’s clubs. She stood out.
“She was furious as a 15-year-old when she didn’t play a full match,” recalls her coach at the time, Dan Eggen. “Based on the mentality and the skills at that time you were certain that this was a very good talent”.
– Hat-trick express –
The following year, Ada made her debut in the Norwegian women’s first division, scoring a hat trick in just seven minutes against the league’s top team.
from World Soccer Talk https://ift.tt/2EvlPD4
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