PHOTO: Bildbyrån
Henrik Lundqvist will forever be a Tre Kronor hero.
Now a forgotten memory from the time in the national team uniform is revealed.
– “Listen, you can come here now. Henke doesn’t see…”, says Tre Kronor’s goalkeeper coach Stefan Ladhe in the podcast “Släpp Sargen”.
It was both Olympic gold in 2006 and WC gold in 2017 for Henrik Lundqvist in the Tre Kronor shirt during his 74 international matches in blue and yellow. Add to that a bunch of Olympic and World Cup silver and you understand that this is one of Swedish hockey’s best goalkeepers of all time we are talking about.
The panic for Henke
In addition to the fact that “Henke” was a real winner on the ice, he was also a perfectionist down to the tips of his fingers. Just like many hockey goalies, he too has had his very special match routines before which it was of the utmost importance that he carried out.
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Now reveals Tre Kronor’s long-standing goalkeeper coach Stefan Ladhe a forgotten memory from the past with Lundqvist in the lead role. It was in the 2016 World Cup that panic arose in the dressing room before one of Tre Kronor’s matches in Toronto.
– We changed dressing rooms all the time, pretty much. We had the Toronto Maple Leafs nice locker room one game and then it was something else the next game. It was a perpetual moving of stuff. Before this game, we changed in the Toronto basketball team’s locker room, so it’s a round locker room, says Ladhe in the “Släpp Sargen” podcast.
– Henke is to stand in the goal and I run up to the stands and set up the film camera to film him during the match. Then I get a call from the matrices: “Listen, you can come down now. Henke doesn’t see the clock!”. No…
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Hero with gallows
Ladhe rushes down from the stands and has a flash of genius on the way to the dressing room and will save everything.
– Goalkeepers always get a little more space in the dressing room, but they had put his stuff out so he had the clock behind him. But he has to see it and has his routines for when he has to change and when he has to go out and warm up. So he has to watch the clock, says Tre Kronor’s goalkeeper coach in the podcast.
– So on the way down to the Air Canada Centre, I thought: “how the hell am I going to fix a watch so he can see it?”. But then I figured out that one of the iPads could be used with a big clock on it, so I can set it up in front of him. I find a hanger and start holding on and finally I manage to tape the iPad to the ceiling so he can see it.
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If there was panic among Tre Kronor’s management team, nothing reached Henrik Lundqvist thanks to Stefan Ladhes great rescue. And he got his reward in the form of a thumbs up from the star goalkeeper.
– He’s in his own right, so I don’t want to do anything different for him, but he can do what suits him best. So there was nothing more than a thumbs up from him on that thing. That’s the kind of thing that can happen, he says in the podcast.
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