THUN, Switzerland :Iceland have work to do if they are to keep pace with other European nations in women’s football, team captain Glodis Viggosdottir told Reuters after her side’s 4-3 defeat by Norway in their final Group A game at the Women’s Euros on Thursday.
In a tight, tough group, Iceland found the margins against them as they lost 1-0 to Finland and 2-0 to hosts Switzerland before finally getting on the scoresheet and grabbing three goals only to lose to group winners Norway, bringing Viggosdottir’s fourth Euros campaign to a close.
“I think it’s something that we’ve been maybe a little bit naive to,” the 30-year-old said of the pace of development in the women’s game. “Definitely, you can see that countries are really pushing women’s football, and they’re doing a lot to progress as a team.
“We need to make sure that we don’t allow them to go past us, because we want to compete with the best. We know we’re a small country but we want to compete with the best, and we need to find that little extra that makes us special and in this tournament, we didn’t find it.”
Iceland finished bottom of the group with no points and exit the tournament alongside Finland, whose 1-1 draw with hosts Switzerland was not enough to get them through to the knockout stage, leaving Norway and the Swiss to advance.
Viggosdottir expressed her disappointment at not registering a win in Switzerland and said that she could not pinpoint exactly what needed to be done, but she stressed that keeping up with the rest of the pack would mean making the most of Iceland’s playing resources.
“We are a small country and we don’t get 80 million people to choose from – we have 400,000 and we have to make the best of what we have. We need to get the best out of every single person and find that little extra that makes us special,” she said.
Still dressed in her kit almost an hour after the final whistle, her white socks stained with grass from one of the many tackles she put in against the Norwegians, Viggosdottir was already looking forward to the next challenge for her national team.
“I think we saw in this tournament that there’s a few things that we need to improve and need to do better,” she said.
