Friday, May 21, 2021
DEB team sweeps Italy off the ice
Mission “Ice Fairy Tale” starts brilliantly
The German national ice hockey team gets off to a furious start in the world championship in Latvia. Against Italians plagued by corona with 15 cases, the compulsory task succeeds in a varied game with beautiful goals. Defensively, however, it needs to be improved.
After a bumpy start, the German national ice hockey players celebrated a goal festival to kick off the World Cup. The team of national coach Toni Söderholm swept the blatant underdog Italy 9: 4 (2: 2, 5: 0, 2: 2) off the ice in the opening game in Riga and recorded the highest win against the Azzurri in World Cup history.
The two-time Stanley Cup winner Tom Kühnhackl (16th), captain Moritz Müller (19th), NHL striker Tobias Rieder (25th), the future Munich Frederik Tiffels (28th), the Berlin Marcel Noebels (36./ 39th), Lukas Reichel (38th) and Leo Pföderl (49th) as well as Matthias Plachta (43rd) from Mannheim scored the goals for the selection of the German Ice Hockey Federation (DEB), which after two weeks without match practice and only three Joint training sessions came into play hard, but then dominated the action at will.
Olympic silver medalist Jonas Müller received a game misconduct penalty after a dangerous gang check against Marco Rosa (40th). Alex Petan (18th) and Luca Frigo (19th) scored a 2-1 lead for the Italians, who went into the tournament badly decimated after 15 corona cases in preparation. In addition, Anthony Bardaro (44th) and Daniel Frank (45th) were successful.
On Saturday (11.15 a.m. / Sport1), the DEB selection in preliminary group B is required again. The second opponent, Norway, is of a different caliber than the Azzurri, who only rose in 2018 and have been a regular in the top class since 2006. The last three World Cup duels against the Scandinavians were lost.
Strong second third
In the first World Cup game after 729 days – due to the cancellation of the tournament in Switzerland last year – Söderholm featured six World Cup debutants and seven players who are 25 years old or younger. The Finn had renounced the young Munich star John Peterka, the Düsseldorf Daniel Fischbuch and the Straubing Andreas Eder im Sturm as well as the Wolfsburg defender Dominik Bittner, who have not yet been officially reported. The Nuremberg goalkeeper Niklas Treutle also sat in the stands.
The DEB selection was on the ice for the first time in this formation, there was no real rehearsal because of the quarantine regulations. The youngest had the first big chance: Reichel, who only celebrated his 19th birthday on Monday, failed after a solo (8th). The “LA” series took care of the tour: Kühnhackl met Rieder and Nico Krämmer after preliminary work by his Landshut youth colleagues. The former NHL striker also scored his last international goal in Riga: the decisive 3-2 win against Latvia in the 2016 Olympic qualification, which made the silver sensation in Pyeongchang possible in the first place.
A bad pass from Reichel initiated the surprising equalization. Only 26 seconds later the German team fell behind, but captain Müller responded promptly in his 159th international match. The renewed lead was particularly worth seeing: Rieder flicked the puck into the corner with his backhand. Tiffels used the second power play to make it 4: 2. The DEB selection was now much more aggressive and determined to work. Like a baseball player, Noebels hit the target from the air for the decisive fifth goal into the net. In the five-minute shortfall after Jonas Müller’s exclusion, Plachta hit the front, but there were also two shots in the back. In the second third, the DEB team scored a total of five hits.
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