welcome to sophie and co and sophie shevardnadze today moscow welcomes to draw for the thief a twenty thousand world cup with the lucky teams already looking forward to the group stage one of the debutantes of the competition iceland has already won the hearts of fans to waldo over at the twenty sixth and heroes and it's manager hey mir hall grimson is my guest today. the first time in history i salute you both see this bring in the viking spirits to

the sea from world cup to being the smallest of the nations and bright for sports owes them a price which parent iceland's meteoric rise from food balls pointer bags to fear giant killer is the underdog just a passing fad or are we about to see the birth of a new food bowl superpower on the world stage. him your whole grimson welcome to the show it's a pleasure to have you on our program now this is going to be iceland's first ever world cup are you going to pull off another app sat on progress out of the group stage or even further when after a year or it seems like anything is possible for iceland. if course. to do well. we have to be in russia lake lake everyone else and it's done quite a lot of good results so why not in the world cup finals we least hope so but we are also realistic that we can have

a fantastic games but but still lose against it like nations normally in the world cup final so we are realistic but icelanders are normally really optimistic so how optimistic are you i mean what is your goal to to what to when you reach semi finals quarter finals. well to begin with of course it's a great honor just to be there if we progress from the group stage i think that is a big achievement for for iceland but we know from the past from the like past five six years that if we have our best games we we can beat anyone. but. i think it's healthy to dream to hold the world cup. in our hands but of course it's. statistically probably not likely we're going to win it but. like i said before we have we're optimistic and we don't know yet more teams we

played against or what nations we are playing against so we haven't set any any gauche yet but of course we go in there to to progress from the group stage and from there it's champion it's like a cup. so if we have a good game we can we can we never want to let now only play in the cup but now your team iceland has all this international experience facing top teams so you could choose which countries do you want to get and which ones do you want to avoid in a world cup. i don't think there's an easy team in the world cup final so . my opinion is we don't actually mind who we get we know we're going to get strong teams i don't think for ice on this team that we should win. but hopefully you know the best teams in the world you can't avoid them because they

are in group one. so yeah we're always going to have a team that's really really really difficult to beat in from from. group one and group two so. i don't mind which team we get we just we accept what we get so you have this big breakthrough right iceland is the underdog anymore i read what he has seen what the team is capable off isn't going to be a lot harder this time around i mean do you feel the pressure now that you've sat you know sort of the limit that you can be really good. no the pressure is more or less from zero self's. that has been. pretty many groups. all the games were tough. teams play a little bit different against us from the days in the past so we just prepare for everything. and yeah we have maybe not so much pressure on doing results but

it's harder and harder because it's very unlikely that people who are underestimate us i just wonder why didn't you leave the team after your were twenty sixteen like larsson leatherback i mean to leave on a high and try your hand at coaching a club or another national team. i actually believe we could do even better than none the euro's and luckily i did. have the contract so i couldn't leave the contract no it was never in the plan to to leave the national team because i think still we can improve from what we are doing so. i still believe iceland could do even better than we have been doing yet and the dutch team coach dick advocaat says your team should be looked up to having no inner conflicts no personal ambitions but common ground discipline is that your personal achievement

as a coach or more of an icelandic national trait well what's the secret. i wish i could say it's all me but but it isn't it's. is a really big group that's come in together and trying to do this as a team both the play is the stuff the f.a. and we have a special relationship with the fans and we have a special relationship with the media so it's a big team working together to make this happen and in the world as it is today like all the money involved in all the. i don't want to say greed but it's a lot about. the individual today everything today is about the individual so it's so nice to be a little ditty the icelandic football players have maybe because we come from one amateur environment so we know that the other nations have better individuals and more individual qualities than we have so we have to be

collectively better than the others and i. think that's a good message to icelanders and to the kids in iceland we have to stick together and work together to achieve one how maybe it's like a national trade of smaller nations because every other football team's coach actually dreams of the kind of unity that you have in your team why isn't it working out with others. i can't answer that one and because i don't know what the others are doing but we have and we have and. we don't try to hide what we are doing so we are open about how we have achieving things and how we are working so this is no secret in it. and you know you can't do anything in a sport like football unless you have good football players that it's always number one two and three you have good football players luckily for us they're really really good characters so it's possible to build a good team around good football players and that's of course

a fantastic blend so most of your players they play in europe how do you keep the. coersion going the players see each other so rarely. i think that's a good thing about thing i don't think that's any different from. other national teams you know that they are playing everywhere our own europe. in other national teams so it's no different from my son but what is a little bit special with a the ice in a national team is that the players have been playing together since the bulk of the squad has been playing together since they were in the under seventeen under one thousand and twenty one so they know each other quite well that they played many of them together in the same team as us players so the relationship between the player is also special. in our squad is there probably closer to each other than in most of the national teams know what you are

a doctor by trade i know that when doctors work on medical problems like before an operation it they sit there and analyze and think about the job months before it happens and complicated cases so why are players are being off in all their here playing clubs how do you prepare the team for the next game when you don't have a team present. i guess it's the same for me like clegg. every other national team coach we plays. we watch the games and on allays ok ames in the past we opponents and i like them and so on but you know we try to see as many places as we can it's probably easier for a nice of a national coach to want to tell their players because we don't have that many play in europe we have about a hundred professional play in across europe so it's probably easier

for an i studied national team coach to want to talk his players so when i say my answer to actually well there's a continent to see your players in action during their club games yeah sometimes we do but because we are so spread we don't have a leg the russian national team coach us most of his players play in russia. we're spread all over europe so more or less we use the modern technology to watch as many games as we can during especially the weekend and we have today we have software that we can see every game everywhere in the world so easy to see the play especially if if we hear they have been doing well or badly we can we can look back to that game whenever we like so modern technology makes it makes it much much easier to be a national team coach today than it was before him here say you know how it works

which success usually comes with downfalls and now that the whole world is in iceland fan to them there's a danger that your players maybe will lose that humility and with that the team spirit. naan not afraid of that we talk about did regularly about why we win football matches why we are we are good as a team what we are about and what we know we win football matches for so. overestimate yourself when you have success but don't try to just because we had success and i think said stay with us.

is unique because the tribal lands are normally off limits to the public erickson because he's the. people here know him simply is dog to eric he's rich and famous some always on the move sailing yachts and flying aircraft. he's considered one of the best neurosurgeons in brazil. that's happening. so soon. going to be. nothing's going to get the population because he's going to people.

that were back with a mere hologram so manager of iceland's football team discussing the team's stunning rise at euro two thousand and sixteen and their expectations for the world cap so there are as you've said earlier. you all often mention there's too much money in football and that money's to enemy a lot of nation but you know players who play in the english premier league you had players from barcelona monod in corrupt them so it must be something else and now. no i've never said that money is destroying everything but of course for some. when you have plenty of it. it stops motivating you but of course you have examples

of the best football players in the world that had a lot of lot of money but still really motivated so it depends on the personality. but of course. it is difficult to motivate yourself when you don't need anything in the world but that's when it's down to the cutter of the person. during this quarter finals with friends i slipped fans occupied a relative was more a part of standard close yet it was like ten percent or less less population as some statistics say statistics put it and i remember vividly the viking clap chanting and singing is one of those guys i mean they're really some shock waves throughout the world let alone the stadium was it all the result of some coordinated effort or spontaneous. i think it's a blend of both it's been slowly increasing their support in the national team is

getting and all the credit goes to the supporters club that has been. stick growing all the time to win more more things and if you look back four five years ago. it was. you didn't see many with the icelandic national should on on team games but know all the stand this blue everybody has a national team sure the saying in the national anthem before the game and the iceni national anthem is maybe not the most motivational song ever made so the change is enormous in the support and it's both spontaneous of course the. interest increases with better resorts but it's again also the supporters' club that has been growing steadily and i kind of take in control of what's happening and and i hope so tremendously that russia will see the best of icelandic fans

because it's kind of a family. family fun you know to you take your kid you take your wife you to get your grandmother to the game. and it's a different kind of support because it's a lot of ownership and from the fans in the team almost everyone has. a relative or a friend he's playing or in the stuff so i think it was unique regarding the icelandic supporters and also i'm thinking of ben many fans came to the euros perhaps even more will come to the world cup so he's actually just going to take one giant holiday for a whole month i mean who is going to stay behind to work and that was the problem in the euros it was a lot of a lot of companies that almost how to play because there were so many many people in france and i hope it's going to be the same and in russia next summer. and i hope the icelandic fans will show the best side because they were really

something to be proud of in front and i think and i know that when they come in numbers to russia and know they will be good guests in russia so i know you have a tradition of going to this fancy pub before home games of the national team having a chat with them what do you do this for i mean how do you deal with everyone there telling you how to do your job yeah it's difficult to explain and it's. it's hard for many to under understand how this is possible but i think firstly it's something that makes us different. not a national team coach can walk into a pub. to enough hours before a game and talk to. maybe four or five hundred people that's there so much drinking beer you know different kinds of people that but there's

a lot of respect. to do it of course we respect our fans and we show that with was doing this and what i think is more unique and more special is that we have done it no i've done it now for six years and nothing has gone online . in the media so it's a rule for the fans that they shot their phones off nobody's record than anything nobody is tweeting anything and the fans are the first one to know the lineup and the fans are given what how we are going to play against the opponent and so on and so forth so that they have a lot of information about how we want to play and for me that that is something unique that that is something that i don't want to lose because it's give the fans ownership in the team they respected enormously and we respect them and when we

trust them like we do and i think it's very hard to do that anywhere in the world so this makes us a little bit this is something that we have the only national team that does this and i love it it's kind of strange of course for some to think about it but there while it works i think it's a fantastic way to give ownership to the fans. so like you said everyone knows everyone and somehow each family is related in one way or another to the soccer team how hard is it in the circumstances for you to be a public person. it's quite easy. actually it's quite easy to live in a four thousand people will age or an island just in the south coast of iceland so whenever it's get gets too much i go there are new locks and when you come from a small village you you go there and everybody knows yourself for what you are and

you don't have to play in it then you don't have to be you know you don't have to act anything because everybody knows you anyway so they would see through it so it's nice to come from a small ready to go there and relax after. after something big like we when we when we want the right to go to russia. but it's quite easy because the media also knows. how things are go in we were closely with the icelandic media and i think again something special the relationship between the national team and the ice on the media the there are probably closer to the national team than any media in the world. and we trust them and they trust us so it's it's again something special that we have and what makes us a team also so it's quite easy to be in iceland in a time of success there is one u f i qualified football coach for eight hundred

people in iceland that's compared to one per eleven thousand in the u.k. for instance iceland has also the highest density of indoor football pitches than any other country in the world was made in such a massive investment into basically just a game it's not factories where. the country is investing in right. now it's the local communities that not pay for the for the facilities in every village in every town and that's nuts again good facilities and good coaching is. the most necessary parts to produce good who will play as. boat. what we like to think and what we have known from research is that the kids they do better in school. when they do sports. they become more healthy they do less drugs they do less alcohol when they do sports and or whole villages in iceland

thrive and pride themselves of good facilities for for sports. and football especially in quite well with the with coach education so so it doesn't matter if you come from two thousand people a village or the icelandic jump ins you almost get the same coach and so you don't need to drive your kid a long distance for good coaching it's all local locally based so i think that's again something unique in iceland and it's difficult for big nations to to replicate that so yeah you correct the local communities that not do the. do the facilities and pay for the facilities here you have been an assistant coach and a coke coach you coach quite a few teams yourself what approach brings better results i mean should the coach be strict demanding keep his distance or does it work better when you're the players

friend part of the team. it's different. between teams you coach and sometimes you have to be tough sometimes you have to be different and i think it's it's a balance between everything and. we are quite. it's quite a good routine in what we are doing know so distance is ok and a coach always has to keep a certain distance. but you can see everything work you can see. like a coach it like a dictator and you can see a coach that's hugging everyone so you have to evaluate what players you have or what club you have or what team you have. it might be the culture of the nation or whatever so it's not one in my opinion it's not not one type of code that's better than the other you just have to look at the sorts of

circumstances and surroundings so footballers are tempted to break the rules for the sake of winning you pull a share or tackle someone's lag instead of a ball or just outright dive do you think winning is worth doing things like that. again depends on the board game what's the score. but of course nobody wants to cheat. and and its name is never any shortcuts to a place worth coming to and i think that's a good sentence. but you know you you sometimes even applaud the player for falling on opponent go in for an counter-attack whatever and it's a yellow card but it's still worth it the important isn't score so it's very difficult question to answer present there was this case in germany when referee gave

a penalty but the player who earned it who was fouled came up to the raf and sat there was no foul and the penalty should be counseled other countries have seen similar cases of course and i wonder if you've seen it like that influence is it more important to be honest like that and fair in fair play or to actually put the team forward to help the team win reward the fans. would be very. would be very stupid to say that you should cheat. it is always it's not only in football it's in life you should always try to be as honest as you can and you should always be honest. and i think that's a philosophy everybody should should live by and work by. thank you very much for this interesting insight into the world of football we're talking to hey mayor hall grimson iceland's football coach and one of those behind the national team's stunning success at the euros twenty sixteen that is it for the latest edition of

sophia and koalas see you next time. from the cause more than just money it's more than just revolutionary it's affecting all that sucking in every asset class nouns of the history of humanity into one glorious up to who knows where.

time is getting international recognition with the help of israel at least in the world of zoos remember wolf it was dismissive to you i commit these with my complicity is going up to study hall maybe. you know john. the only palestinians who gets the most help from its jerusalem counterparts i don't think there's some of those who were on the vision no one who could give us. i know it does a lot to this lady of the muscle that you have i know if you continue muslims you know do more commitments also don't piss off.

the police. if you. like that. israeli warplanes conduct air strikes near damascus according to unconfirmed israeli media reports. also this hour a bomb scare triggers a mass evacuation near a christmas market in the german city of. u.s. national security advisor michael flynn pleads guilty to making false statements to the f.b.i. as possible probe into russia links. for those later stories head to our dot com

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