Torbjørn Bergerud could not do everything for Norway in the first part of the first half. Despite making eight saves — more than half of the shots aimed at him — in the first 20 minutes, he could not prevent France from taking the advantage and increasing it to five goals, before Norway shortened the gap to three goals at the break.
The fans in Unity Arena were cheering louder than before when the two teams came back on the court, but France did everything in their power to silence the Norwegian fans. Keeping up their offensive rhythm, they kept their five-goal safety net throughout the second half, despite Sander Sagosen’s efforts.
GROUP C
H2H: 16-1-9
Top scorers: Hugo Descat 6/7 (FRA); Sander Sagosen 9/14 (NOR)
Goalkeeper saves: Charles Bolzinger 4/21, Rémi Desbonnet 5/22 (FRA); Robin Haug 3/10, Torbjørn Bergerud 11/41 (NOR)
POTM presented by Grundfos: Sander Sagosen (NOR)
- with Dika Mem and Elohim Prandi behind the wheel, France took a two-goal advantage several times in the first half, without managing to completely shake off their opponents
- things got worse when Charles Bolzinger decided to match Torbjørn Bergerud’s performance between France's posts, helping his team take a five-goal gap and prompting Jonas Will to take two timeouts within five minutes
- those two breaks kind of put Norway back on track and, thanks to Tobias Grøndahl and Sander Sagosen — who netted four goals each in the first half — they were still in the game at the break
- but France never panicked throughout the second half, as their advantage never went under three goals at the 53rd minute
- Guillaume Gille took a key timeout, and immediately after his team scored twice in a row to secure the victory
- Norway’s Sander Sagosen scored nine, reaching 212 goals and surpassing Stefan Lövgren to become EHF EURO's fourth-best all-time scorer
- France finish first in group C and will start the main round with two points, while Norway were also already qualified, but they will travel to Herning with zero points
France’s offensive power on display
France beat their record for most goals scored in an EHF EURO game twice in their 2026 campaign. On Monday in Oslo, they did not repeat the performance — but nobody expected them to. However, that does not mean that the EHF EURO title holders played bad offensively — it was actually far from that.
Despite Torbjørn Bergerud delivering a great performance, with eight goals in the first half, France still scored 20, powered by the speed of their back court. Nédim Rémili’s absence means Aymeric Minne is in the playmaker position and HBC Nantes' player turns Les Bleus’ game into something even more spectacular than it was before. And since they scored 38, France have proved that they are not only spectacular, but also efficient.
Very happy of course, because that was a very tough game. We started it well, even though we missed a couple of open shots in front of the goalkeeper. But our defence was quite strong, we played well at the start of the second half to take the advantage and keep it until the end.
France is a great team with excellent players, so it’s really hard to play against them. They are the better team, so, of course, congrats to them. At the same time, we think we played a good game, but we are a bit annoyed of our own error that gave away too many easy balls for them, but after we played seven-against-six, we played quite good in the attack, but we had too many problems in the defence.
