The Faroe Islands’ 12 points is their best-ever haul in a qualifying competition. <\/p>\n
They moved a point behind the Czechs after their 2-1 win, through goals from Hanus Sorensen and Martin Agnarsson.<\/p>\n
Both players are younger than 25 and, according to Faero, represent a new face for the national team.<\/p>\n
“I’d say they’re power players,” added the KI centre-back. “They have explosiveness, agility, young naiveness, if you can call it that. They basically don’t care who they’re running up against – it’s just water off a duck’s back.<\/p>\n
“That’s sometimes what you need. Someone who shows no remorse, no respect when we’re attacking.<\/p>\n
“We’ve seen that defending, but now suddenly we’ve got a few profiles on the team who can bite back when we attack – and that’s one of the reasons why we could beat Montenegro 4-0.<\/p>\n
“So when we have counter-attacks, I think teams are waking up and thinking ‘OK, this is not just a defending team’.”<\/p>\n
Unlike Sorensen and Agnarsson who play professionally in Slovenia and Denmark, Faero combines football with another job.<\/p>\n
He works for a furniture store in his native country, where he has just won the league again with KI.<\/p>\n
Head coach Eyoun Klakstein used to be a crime writer, while Faero and the team’s other part-time players illustrate just how much of an underdog the Faroe Islands will be when they take on Croatia’s stars, including Luka Modric and Josko Gvardiol, in Rijeka.<\/p>\n
“It’s not so much different from what you would imagine if it was a semi-pro team in England,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There’s always a few electricians, a few joiners. There’s a teacher, and then something that’s quite popular among young players here is to work in kindergarten because it’s reduced hours and works well with football training.<\/p>\n
“There’s also [Arni] Frederiksberg, who scored the penalty against Montenegro. He’s actually the CEO of a wholesale company and they sell loads of food products. One of the products is pizzas, so he’s called the ‘pizza seller’, but he is in fact a CEO.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Faroe Islands’ 12 points is their best-ever haul in a qualifying competition. They moved a point behind…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":139301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-139300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/139301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}