Canada got its gold back – Kommersant

The Ice Hockey World Championship, which was hosted by Finland and Latvia and in which the Russian team did not take part due to international sanctions, ended with the final in Tampere and another victory for the Canadian team. This time, in order to get the gold, she had to deal with unexpectedly high-flying Germans in it. Outsiders during the match led twice, but still lost – 2:5.

The current World Championship, having presented a bunch of all sorts of plots that were anomalous by previous standards, such as the bronze take-off of the Latvians who never won medals in the top tournaments, who beat the Americans in the match for third place, or the Germans reaching the final, taxied to an absolutely familiar, routine, one might say, outcome . The Canadian team won its 28th overall world championship in the usual way that has become for it since the end of the last decade. She didn’t really care about the formation of the composition for the Finnish-Latvian tournament, she didn’t chase the stars, gathering it mainly from the players of the third or fourth links of the NHL clubs. And from her hockey, as well as from the application, there was no special brilliance. Strictly speaking, it was ordinary, low-key hockey, which, for example, at the group stage did not look like a problem either for the strong Swiss, or even for the weak Norwegians who also won the eternal favorites.

Nevertheless, Canadian resources turned out to be quite enough to reach the final of the World Cup for the fourth time in a row, knocking out last year’s winners – the Finns in the quarterfinals, and after them coping with opponents from a more modest niche – Latvians and Germans.

The finale perfectly, like the last piece of a big puzzle left at the bottom of the box, complemented the overall picture created by this strange championship. A person who does not know the age-old hockey layouts, watching him, should have decided that two completely equal teams are meeting.

They can only be distinguished from each other by their shape. Well, one is still a little biter, and the other is a little lazier, or something. And the one that bites the most is the German team. And there is nothing surprising in the fact that it is she who opens the scoring after a cool wrist throw from John-Jason Peterka.

The Canadian game before him was like the game of a team that convinced itself that it had a lot of time in reserve and that you can not tear right off the bat, in any case, we will have time to fix everything. After it, it looked like a game of a team that suddenly realized that there really wasn’t so much time and that every mistake here had a substantial price. The Canadians bounced back outwardly surprisingly easily. They added a little movement, intercepted the puck, and Peyton Krebs laid it out for Sammy Blay.

After scoring, the Canadian team gladly returned to its previous mode – not exactly sleeping, but, strictly speaking, definitely not the one in which world championship finals are usually cut. And again the Germans punished her severely for this. They were lucky with rebounds, and Daniel Fischbuch successfully caught the puck jumping on the ice with a stick, stunning Canadian goalkeeper Sam Montembo.

It was not difficult to predict what would happen next. And for the second time, the opponent’s bite acted on the Canadians as a good cure for drowsiness – they ran in, earned.

The outburst of activity resulted in a majority for Team Canada and a goal from Lawson Krause.

However, in the final period, she decided to abandon the previous strategy. It was the Canadian team, more or less familiar to everyone – maybe not sparkling with technique, but at least terribly militant, ready to fight on any part of the site. This one didn’t have to wait until she was stung to get a good start.

The Canadians took the lead for the first time thanks to just assertiveness. In the key episode of the meeting, it was shown by Cody Glass, who won the puck behind the German gate and got out with it on the patch. He failed to ram the German goalkeeper Matthias Niederberger, but Sammy Blay arrived in time to help. Soon, the German national team could well be finished off by Milan Lucic. The bar saved the intrigue.

Not for long. The Germans, of course, rushed to win back, and catching opponents on an excessive enthusiasm for the attack was Canadian bread at the World Cup. Tyler Toffoli disposed of his chance perfectly.

The Germans in the end, of course, removed the goalkeeper, changing him to the sixth field player. But everything was useless – they just let Scott Lawton through an empty net.

Against the Canadian scrap, no matter how simple it may look from the outside, at the World Championships again no one had a reception.

Alexey Dospekhov