Editor’s note: I am a bad bad Balls. I screwed up AGAIN and just realized I was supposed to write a Saturday Night Open Thread. Instead of a Karen Carpenter job, I present to you Horatio’s fine Norway preview. Enjoy!

The Norwegian women won the World Cup in 1995 and they’ve done fuck-all since.  In 2022, in fact, they managed their worst loss as a program, 8-0 to the English.  Truly Lindisfarne was avenged that day.

Since that defeat they’ve fired their coach, (probably understandably), brought in a new one and gone to a “more cynical” approach involving either a 4-3-3 or 5-4-1 set up.  “More cynical” in this respect meaning “we know that we can’t score, or really even create the illusion that we might score, so we’re going to park everyone in front of the goal and either hope you fuck up so bad that we can do something off the counter, or at least drag this thing into penalty kicks and hope that Asgard’s good fortune smiles upon us that day.”

Norway are in Group A, and sit at 50-1 odds to win the Cup.  They open against New Zealand on 7/20, follow that up against Switzerland on 7/25, and then finish out against the Philippines on 7/30.  Despite their less-than-stellar recent history, Norway is the highest ranked of all these squads, coming in at 12.  Switzerland and New Zealand follow at 20th and 26th respectively, and the Philippines shows up at 46.  Using my vast expertise in counting things I would therefore say that Norway is actually favored to win the Group and advance to the knockout stages.

Additional information about the Norwegian Women’s National Lesser Footy Team is that their nickname is The Grasshoppers, and no I do not know why.  Their best player is Ada Hegerberg, a 27-year-old striker who is, yes, blonde and blue-eyed.  She is a former Ballon d’Or winner, and apparently only recently returned to the national squad following a dispute about the progress of the women’s team in 2016 followed by missing two years due to a ruptured ACL.

The Norway FA has been paying the men’s and women’s team equally since 2017, with the men donating some of their related commercial earnings to make this happen.  Fom this we can deduce that Norway is run by filthy Socialists.

My expert* prediction, based on the last 15 minutes and possibly being Norwegian instead of Danish, something we found out after Dad took an ancestry test that, in addition to confusion my heritage also really limits my ability to commit crimes, is that any team ranked 12th should make the quarter-finals and then lose.  So that’s my call for The Grasshoppers.