The Saturday Interview with Toe Pedersen TORE Pedersen used the f-word and suddenly all your illusions evaporated.

He had sat there, in a quiet room in The Dunkenhalgh, relaxed, insightful, thoughtful.

In trainers, jeans and polo shirt - and sporting a thin layer of stubble - he looked every inch your quintessential cosmopolitan footballer, the very realisation of boyhood dreams.

Then out of the blue came the f-word. He didn't always want to be a footballer, he said. He wanted to be a fighter pilot.

And if he could be one, he would quit football tomorrow.

"I tried to get into fighter pilot school just after leaving school," said Pedersen, bought by Blackburn Rovers from Hamburg St Pauli for a neat £500,000 this week.

"But there were only 50 places on offer and about 10,000 applicants so the chances were not too good."

His flair for maths was not heavily taxed in making this deduction but neither did it help.

Pedersen was turned down and turned to football. But the other dream lived on.

Ironically, through football, the dream was realised, albeit only for a day.

He completed his national service in a fighter squadron. Being part of the ground crew, he never flew.

Repeatedly, he asked for permission to take to the skies but repeatedly he was denied.

That is until he struck a bet with his commanding officer, who scoffed at Pedersen's claim that Norway would defeat Italy in 1991 and promised him a flight in a Lockheed F-16 Fighting Falcon if they did.

Pedersen, therefore, had more reason than usual to perform well for his country. He did. So did Norway. The Italians were beaten 2-1 and the hand of Tore rested on the controls of an F16, one of the most prolific fighter aircraft in the world and the backbone of the Allied campaign during the Gulf War.

"It was a dream come true for me, moving through the sky at 2,000kph - it was magic!" recalled Pedersen.

It was in complete contrast to the tranquil lifestyle with which he grew up in the harbour town of Fredrikstad where his father, Einar, worked on the ships, a tradition upheld to this day by Tore's brother, Roar.

It is a life that, despite all the wealth associated with a modern footballer, Pedersen still yearns for.

"I like the boating life," he said, revealing also that he likes the simple life for he has no aspirations to acquire large yachts and dock them in St Tropez alongside those of the rich and famous.

"Going out on the sea in a small boat, there is nothing like it."

Tore Pedersen is in reflective mood but it needs only gentle probing to divert his thoughts to the future.

He has played at more clubs than the singer, Tony Bennett, but he regards the move to Rovers as the biggest of his career.

"I played for IFK Gothenburg but I believe this club is bigger," he said.

"The first thing I noticed when I came to the training ground was that the pitches are marvellous, the gym, even the kitchen.

"Also there is now much more money in the English game.

"But I looked not only at the club when making my decision.

"I looked at the manager.

"Roy Hodgson is the type of manager I want to play for. He gets the best out of players and Rovers' start to the season proves that."

It helps too that Pedersen has four Scandanavian kindred spirits to seek support of at Rovers. And Oyvind Leonhardsen, his room-mate on Norwegian international trips, is just down the M6.

It is clear that keeping in touch with his roots is important to Pedersen despite the nomadic nature of a career that has taken him from Norway to Sweden to Germany, Japan and England.

"I don't see why you should start to change yourself," said the 27-year-old who was about to move to England in 1994 after a short loan period at Oldham but he injured his knee.

"It is important for me to remain the same person.

"People think you've changed if you start to drive a Mercedes instead of a Ford.

"But people don't really know you. They think they do and they convince themselves they do.

"That's the worst thing about football. People think they know you without meeting you. They want to chat to you.

"But it's something that comes with the job.

"A footballer's life is short so, for now, you must put up with it."

He can live in relative anonymity in East Lancashire but the members of Norway's national squad come under as much scrutiny back home as England's players do here. And for them it is more pronounced because the country's population is only 4million.

Pedersen is big enough to handle it and ambitious enough still to see the move to Rovers as an opportunity to propel himself back into the forefront of the Norwegian manager's thoughts after the disappointment of missing out in the run-up to the European Championships last year.

"I suffered a cruciate ligament injury and instead of having an operation I tried to build up the muscle around it," said the Norwegian who listens to Irish music, The Waterboys, Hot House Flowers and U2 "because it gets you in a good mood".

"It worked but eventually the strain was too much and the knee gave out.

"It was the low point of my career.

"You can't do your work and you wonder what you will do.

"I was out six months but you never know in football."

This is why Pedersen put his immediate aim here as "staying injury-free".

Longer-term goals will be to try to displace Colin Hendry and Stephane Henchoz at the heart of Rovers' defence. Roy Hodgson might be best advised then to declare an air-free zone over Brockhall and surrounding areas to ensure Pedersen sticks to what he came here for and is not lured into flying any more fighter planes.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.