When Halldor Einarsson’s sports kit
company started selling shirts to Iceland fans for Euro 2016, they added a
felt-tip pen to the deal. The three Group B fixtures were printed on the right
sleeve, with a box to fill in the scores.
“I thought we would maybe get one
draw from those three games, and I wasn’t arrogant enough to leave space for a
fourth match,” said Einarsson, one of the best-known figures in Icelandic
football, who once arranged a summer visit by Manchester United and persuaded
George Best to play against them.
His predictions were wrong and his
company, Henson, has had to go into overtime to try to cope with demand.
Iceland won one, drew two and they next play the biggest match in the nation’s
sporting history, a knockout tie against England in Nice tomorrow.
“We’re making more shirts, these ones
with the England game on them,” said Einarsson, who was twice a national
champion in his playing days with Valur, one of Reykjavik’s top clubs..
“If we win, we can find room for the
next one, the quarter-final. No matter how far the team progresses, we will
find room to put the matches on there. It’s hard to cope with demand, but it’s
great fun.”
Henson and fellow members of the
older generation in Icelandic football can barely believe what is happening,
but already they are talking about beating England.
.
“This is our dream come true, but for
so long it was just a dream,” said Sigmundur Steinarsson, who has written a
two-part history of football in Iceland, and has reported on the game since
1970. “We didn’t play a game on grass until 1957. Before that, we played on
lava – crushed gravel. We were a very bad team for many years.”
The first “international” contests
were in 1939, when the Islington Corinthians, a now defunct amateur team from
north London, defeated Iceland’s finest 1-0 and 3-2 in Reykjavik. The visitors
were presented with a gift: copies of Iceland: Nature and Nation in
Photographs.
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