Erling Haaland scored again and Norway moved even closer to qualifying for the World Cup for the first time since 1998 by beating Estonia 4-1 in Oslo on Thursday.<\/p>\n
The win virtually secures a spot for the high-scoring Norwegians in next year\u2019s tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Norway has a vastly superior goal difference compared to second-placed Italy, which is six points behind in Group I. Italy plays at Moldova later Thursday.<\/p>\n
If Italy fails to win that game, Norway will advance while Italy will have to settle for the playoffs where the four-time World Cup champion was shockingly eliminated in the past two editions. Norway travels to play Italy on Sunday.<\/p>\n
All the goals came in the second half. Haaland scored twice in a six-minute span to increase the lead to 4-0 after Alexander S\u00f8rloth put the hosts 2-0 ahead shortly after the break.<\/p>\n
Haaland has scored 14 of Norway\u2019s European-best 33 goals in seven group-stage games. The Manchester City striker was born two years after Norway last reached the World Cup.<\/p>\n
Later Thursday, France needs to beat Ukraine to qualify from Group D with a game to spare, and Portugal can also advance with a win at Ireland in Group F. <\/p>\n
England, the first European nation to have secured qualification, plays Serbia in Group K.<\/p>\n
Iceland won at Azerbaijan 2-0 in Group D earlier and Hungary took three points in a 1-0 victory at Armenia in Group F.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n
AP soccer: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/soccer<\/p>\n
The Associated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Erling Haaland scored again and Norway moved even closer to qualifying for the World Cup for the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-281031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-soccer","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-soccer","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}