“Sometimes it’s really frustrating, I must say. Sometimes you have episodes or situations where you feel like, ‘damn, we’re in such a man’s world’.”

As if to crystallise the point, her Paris host Martin Solveig invited the Lyon striker to park this sentiment to consider her position on twerking.

Still just 23, Hegerberg’s frustration at how the world is has already caused her to quit playing for Norway.

“A lot of things need to be done to make the conditions better for women who play football. It’s all about how we respect women’s football. I don’t think the respect has been there.”

What might respect for women’s football look like? Probably a lot like respect for men’s football.

On a bitterly cold night in Ballinree, in the parish of Toomevara, deep in north Tipperary hurling country, a kaleidoscope of woolly hats soak up the swirling rain.

More than 70 of them are worn by girls aged 10 to 16, the younger groups already gone home.

A matrix of five-a-sides and skill drills mark out business as usual, screams and chat and laughter the soundtrack.

This is the home of Ballymackey FC, named FAI Club of the Year for 2018. An honour that owes much to its commitment to the women’s game.

“Ballymackey is the blueprint, the model,” says David Lenane, the FAI’s national coordinator for women’s football. “There’s no difference in the activities between boys and girls. What the boys get, the girls get exactly the same. Which is how it should be.”

Last year, the U15 girls won their league. At the presentation, the players quickly noticed something and brought it to the attention of their coach, John Delaney. The trophy inscription read ‘North Tipperary Schoolboys League’.

That’s not the way the club does things. Delaney, head coach of women’s football at Ballymackey, handed back the cup until it was rectified.

“It’s just a small thing,” he said. “It was an old trophy that should have been out of circulation. Is it important? It’s one of those little subconscious biases. It annoyed the girls so it is important.”

Delaney was on the league committee when it rebranded as the North Tipperary Schoolchildren’s Football League in 2011. And he was the driving force, the advocate, when Ballymackey changed course seven years ago.

A well-established men’s and boys’ club, founded in 1973, had run girls’ soccer camps before, but in 2011 its first girls’ team took the field, at U10.

“We had just 12 girls,” Delaney recalls. “But from that moment, we made a decision we were going to go 50/50 as a club. It was a concerted effort.

“We made sure to keep those girls playing, at U12 and up along, then followed up with another U10 team and another U10 team.

“And everything was to be the same as for the boys.

“It is still the big issue in women’s or girls’ sport; girls are not getting treated the same, no matter what we say. Things are tougher for girls.

“But in the club, it’s equal access to the facilities, to the changing rooms or whatever. The girls don’t get shoved out on the back pitch. Everything is 50/50. In fact, some of our better coaches work on the girls’ side, two Uefa B coaches.”

Another important plank in the philosophy: Participation would be the priority, above winning. “That is the key. Everyone plays. You still see it too much where the same kids are getting a few minutes at the end of a game, or maybe none at all.

We sacrifice matches and league titles to play them all. If we have 15 or 16 girls togged out they will all get decent game-time, and not a token five minutes.

All our efforts go to player retention. Our stronger players will go on to North Tipp squads and Emerging Talent programmes and whatever. They’ll get that bit extra there. But we’re targeting getting all the girls playing.

We had one team with four girls on a North Munster squad. But we weren’t winning league titles, even with four serious players, because we were playing everyone. And we were getting beaten by teams who weren’t using subs.

It’s a shift in mindset that’s gradually washing through the club.

“We are getting there with the boys too, but with the girls we had a fresh start. You’re slow to generalise, but maybe girls buy into that more.

“In a boys team, you bring on the weak lad for 10 minutes and they are complaining, ‘he cost us the game’.

“We’re trying to engineer that out of our boys teams too, educate them that we all win together and lose together. But it comes a little easier with the girls.”

Seven years on, results are striking. The goal of 50/50 representation is within touching distance. This year, the club has 180 male players, 165 female, from as young as four.

There are actually more girls’ teams than boys’ right now. There’s a first senior women’s team this year. And for the past two years Ballymackey ran the biggest FAI ‘Soccer Sisters’ Easter camp in the country.

The FAI drops by to size up what they hope is a template that can be replicated nationally. And the club’s catchment has swelled, as first girls, then their brothers, flock from neighbouring parishes like Silvermines, Templederry, and Cloughjordan — even out from Nenagh — to the club known to respect everyone.

“Kids are coming from 15 different national schools. We’re a family club now,” Delaney said. “We have brothers and sisters playing for the same club.

“I see my own kids playing GAA, in the same place but it’s separate clubs. The girls are tenants.”

The Ballymackey girls are winning things as well, despite themselves. League and cup doubles at U15 and U17 last year. The U17s cup had to be updated too.

But there are 12 symbols that stand, better than silverware, for the club’s ethos. John can reel them off.

Eileen Gleeson, Phoebe Kelly, Laura McCarthy, Amy Bergin, Laura Bergin, Aoibhìn Delaney, Rachel O’Gorman, Holly Madden, Mary O’Brien, Niamh O’Brien, Ellen Cunneen and Niamh Cunneen.

That first U10 team. Sixteen now and bucking every known study about dropout rates in girls’ sport. Every one of them is still playing soccer with the club.

“The dropout rate, they say it’s three times higher for girls. But I can’t see why that should be the case,” Delaney says. “We would consider that our biggest success, keeping the girls playing.

“Even the few we do lose, it might be down to specialisation. They might have a chance of making a county camogie panel and they decide they need to throw their attention that way. But we’re not seeing them drop out of sport.

“If they get a game of football they’re happy to stay coming. That’s all anyone wants.

“And it’s got to be fun. You talk about competing with camogie or ladies football or whatever, but we’re competing with bloody PlayStations. If they are coming to training and it’s regimental and boom boom boom… they want to have fun. To chat and be social.”

Amy Bergin and Laura McCarthy have already taken the next step the club considers vital. This week both completed FAI coaching courses. Soon they will be asking young girls at Ballymackey to believe in themselves.

Why have they stuck with soccer?

“I just really enjoy it,” Amy says. “Just knowing all the girls so well, we’re all so close. We’re competitive and we want to win, but there’s not too much pressure on us.

“I do know girls at school who have dropped out of sport but a lot of the time it’s because they weren’t playing.”

Laura has had to cut one activity, since she found herself training seven days a week. But Irish dancing paid the price, rather than soccer or camogie.

“You do notice it (the dropout rate) more in camogie than in soccer,” she says. “I suppose all my friends are playing soccer. The training is always fun and everyone is included. Everyone gets a game.”

Laura’s mother Cathleen emphasises Delaney’s role.

“He’s so good to them. If they lose a match, he’ll still tell them they played brilliant. He’s full of encouragement for them. There’s never any negativity. They could lose 20-0 and they’d all get a game. Every child feels as good as the next.

“Especially when they get to the teenage years, they need a lot of encouragement. Because there are other attractions.”

Can’t see, can’t be?

“I’d say 90% of our girls wouldn’t have a female role model,” Delaney admits. “That’s across the board, camogie, ladies football, I doubt the girls could name too many role models from any of the sports.”

Amy Bergin accepts women like Ada Hegerberg just aren’t on their radar.

“We all knew about Stephanie Roche but there’s not really many matches on TV.”

Laura Bergin watches the football on TV with her dad, mainly Manchester United, but not their new women’s team.

“It’s really only coming in the last six months,” Delaney says. “There’s the 20x20 campaign and the Irish international women have a little bit more profile. To be fair to the FAI, there is a lot more publicity, a lot more match coverage of the senior women’s team. Attendances are improving.

“We need to be taking these girls to international soccer matches and exposing them to female role models.

“That’s going to be the one that takes time. That’s why it’s so important to get girls who come up through the system who are confident enough to go back and coach. These girls can be club role models and the smaller girls can go and watch them play a game of football and see them as footballers.”

Getting the soccer ball kicked around the 15 schools that feed into Ballymackey is high on Delaney’s wishlist.

“We’ve got funding via the North Tipperary Sports Partnership, Healthy Living, to send coaches into two schools on a pilot.

“The FAI has a programme specifically for girls where you can get a coach funded to go into a school for eight weeks.”

But he too gets frustrated by lots of what he sees in a man’s world.

Ballymackey’s better boys are already worked into elite pathways by the age of 10. But girls must wait until U12.

“We’ve very good 10-year-old girls. But by the time they enter a programme, an equivalent boy will have two years done.”

Last year, the north Tipperary U14 boys went to Spain for a tournament, the girls went to Waterford.

The argument is the girls have no interest in trips. That’s just wrong. Of course they do.

The yardstick should be; if we’re doing this for the boys, we should be doing it for the girls.

That’s the yardstick we use in Ballymackey. Maybe that’s why things are going well for us.

A yardstick for respect.