NBHF's Advent Calendar 2024 - Door 1

This article was translated by AI. The original article is written in Norwegian.

This year’s Christmas calendar is under way! Every day until Christmas we will be asking a table hockey player the same five questions. Can you guess who the player is? Post your guess in the comments. The first person to guess correctly gets 2 points, while everyone else who answers correctly gets 1 point. The daily winner gets to pick a free item from the kiosk at Jæren Open, and the overall winner across all of December walks off with a table hockey board! Maximum one comment per person, and you must be logged in for your answer to count.

Who is hiding behind door number 1?

1. What is/was your favourite combination or trick?

It was euphoric when the right winger heeled it through to the centre forward, who shovelled the puck into the red-checked cage! If I remember correctly, it probably gave me the same feeling as when Kjell in Lunch verbally knocks out his colleague Nico in the battle to avoid work assignments.

2. What is your favourite lunch at a table hockey tournament?

Only competitive drinks and food! For example, I was very conscious of this when I was younger. Sprite, Crispo and wheat buns was a lunch that definitely contained everything necessary, as I saw it “back in the days”.

3. Which tournament do/did you most like travelling to?

The Norwegian Championship.

4. What is your best table hockey moment?

I beat Tore Lie 3-1 in the group stage and my mum watched the whole match! I remember Tore Lie declaring: “It’s impossible to score against him!”. That was in Tore Lie’s glory days around the table hockey board, and I don’t think he had “switched off” for that match (at least not the last two minutes…) even though he may already have qualified for the A playoffs. I remember bragging about myself to Svein Hestvaag after the match, and he answered me in magical Bergen dialect: “You beat Tore Lie!? The Norwegian champion!?”😎

5. When do you get up in the morning if the tournament starts at 10:00, and you have a 15-minute trip to the venue?

At 06:00 at the latest, so I have a full three hours for breakfast, coffee, showering and various physical and mental preparations! I start the day by visualising different defensive and offensive pressure plays, puck handling and number of touches on the puck, as well as the mental mechanisms around centre fakes. Then I have my first cup of coffee before stretching out my entire body for 25 minutes. After that comes a short shower, finished off with one minute of cold water to maximally wake up the vagus nerve before the tournament! Then it’s breakfast, a fresh cup of coffee and last night’s sports news on TV. At 08:15 the PCT (personal table hockey coach) arrives and stays for half an hour, where we play for fifteen minutes and discuss for fifteen minutes. Even though the PCT charges the Saturday rate of NOK 2,000 per hour, the chief I pay for that half hour is worth it! Right before I enter the table hockey venue at 09:15, I chug a 0.33-litre box of Red Bull.