Norway vs England, World Cup 2026: why we are staying up at 2:45am for Haaland

My alarm is set for 2:15am. Not 2:45, when the match actually kicks off. 2:15, because I want thirty minutes to make coffee, wake up properly, and not miss a single second of Erling Haaland trying to drag a country of five million people into a World Cup semifinal. If you are in Nepal and you have already set the same alarm, you already know exactly why. If you have not set it yet, set it now, because this is the one you do not want to sleep through.

Norway play England in the quarterfinal of the 2026 World Cup, kicking off at 5pm in Miami on Saturday, which lands at 2:45am on Sunday morning here. It is an ugly time to be awake. It is also, without much competition, the best football has felt in Nepal in years.

Why a Norway match has Nepal setting alarms

Norway have not been at a World Cup since 1998. For almost thirty years, the team simply was not part of the conversation, and nobody outside Norway had a reason to plan their sleep schedule around them. That changed the moment this tournament started, because this Norway team has Erling Haaland in it, and Haaland is arguably the single most watched footballer in Nepal right now, ahead of players on teams that actually made deep runs in the recent past.

Walk through New Road or Boudha on a match weekend and you will see it: sky blue Manchester City shirts with HAALAND across the back, worn by people who could not have told you a single other name on the Norway squad two weeks ago. That is not a knock on anyone. It is just what happens when a player this dominant plays for a club most of the country already watches every week. City fandom in Nepal was already enormous before this World Cup. Haaland just gave it a national team to attach itself to, almost by accident.

The numbers that made this impossible to ignore

Here is what Haaland has actually done to get Norway here, because the stats alone explain the alarm clocks better than any amount of local color:

• 7 goals in 4 matches, the most by any player in their debut World Cup since Poland’s Grzegorz Lato in 1974.
• A brace against Brazil in the round of 16, both goals arriving in the final 11 minutes, to beat the five-time champions 2-1 and send Norway to their first-ever World Cup quarterfinal.
• Norway finished as runners-up in their group behind France, after wins over Iraq (4-1) and Senegal (3-2) and a loss to France (1-4), then beat Ivory Coast 2-1 in the round of 32 before that Brazil result.

That is the story in one line: a country that has not been at a World Cup since the last millennium is one win away from a semifinal, entirely on the back of one player who has been scoring at a rate that outpaces almost everyone else in this tournament.

The other side of the pitch

None of this is to pretend England are some minor obstacle. Harry Kane is one goal behind Haaland for the tournament and has taken his all-time World Cup scoring record to 14, which puts him in genuinely historic company. Kane called Haaland “a machine” ahead of this game, then made a point of saying the two of them play completely different styles of striker, which is his polite way of saying he is not intimidated. England have the deeper squad on paper and the tournament pedigree Norway simply does not have yet. If you are picking this on résumé alone, England are favorites, and reasonably so.

What makes it worth losing sleep over is that Norway and England have actually never met at a World Cup before this, despite facing off 12 times in other competitions over the years, with England winning 7, Norway 2, and 3 ending level. There is no history to lean on here, no rivalry script to follow. Whatever happens tonight, happens for the first time.

Where I land on it

I am picking Norway, and I will admit the pick is not fully rational. It is a bet on a player who has looked less like a footballer and more like a cheat code for four straight matches, and on a team that has already beaten one five-time champion to get this far, so why not another obstacle. Kane is 14 World Cup goals into a career that will be remembered regardless of how tonight goes. Haaland is four matches into his very first one, and he is already forcing his way into conversations usually reserved for players a decade older. I want to see how far that run actually goes before someone finally stops it.

So yes, the alarm is set for 2:15am, coffee will be made, and for about two hours tonight a huge number of us in Nepal will be very quietly, very intensely invested in whether a country of five million people can do something it has never done before. Norway, Haaland, and no sleep. Set your alarm too.