With 35 minutes on the clock at Prenton Park, Sophie Roman Haug stood inside the 18-yard box wearing a look of utter disbelief.
The Liverpool striker had just seen her looping header improbably clawed away from the goal-mouth by Leicester City shot-stopper Janina Leitzig. It was a stunning save, but one that also seemed reflective of Haug’s somewhat disjointed start to life on Merseyside.
The 24-year-old arrived from AS Roma in the summer window for a club-record fee and was tasked with filling the sizable void left by the departing Katie Stengel. Any hope of making an instant impact at her new club was cruelly extinguished when she suffered fractures to the nose and face while away on international duty with Norway on the eve of the Women’s Super League (WSL) season.
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The injury saw Haug miss Liverpool’s improbable opening day victory over Arsenal and she remained sidelined for the impressive dispatch of Aston Villa that followed a week later. The Norwegian was deemed fit to play 60 minutes of Liverpool’s insipid Merseyside derby defeat to Everton but, encumbered by a protective mask and starved of any real service into the box, her debut proved something of a damp squib.
Manager Matt Beard was, however, quick to quash any criticism of his new striker, backing her to deliver once she had been allowed time to really bed in with her new teammates. “We’ve seen enough from what we’ve seen of her playing for Roma, LSK Kvinner and Norway, and what we saw in those first few weeks when she came in to us, to know she will be absolutely fine and she will score lots of goals for
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