“Will draw our conclusions”
DEB team goes under at the national coach debut
04/14/2023 06:47 am
Harold Kreis is supposed to keep the German national ice hockey team at the top of the world after the era of his predecessor Toni Söderholm ended abruptly. But the World Cup preparations under the new national coach started with a clear defeat.
Harold Kreis suffered a defeat on his debut as national ice hockey coach. At the start of the World Cup preparations, the selection of the German Ice Hockey Federation (DEB) lost the Czech Republic 2:6 (1:0, 0:2, 1:4). On Saturday (5 p.m. / MagentaSport) both teams will meet again in Frankfurt.
“We sometimes made it too easy for the Czechs. We weren’t consistent enough with four goals,” said Kreis at MagentaSport: “Today we made some bad decisions with the disc. We’ll draw our conclusions from that.”
For the German team, which still lacked the national players of the DEL semi-finalists and possible reinforcements from the NHL, Tobias Eder from Düsseldorf (9th) and Jonas Müller from Berlin (52nd) scored the goals 30 days before the start of the World Cup. In front of 3,800 spectators in Kassel, Jakub Flek (28th/50th), David Tomasek (35th), Roman Horak (41st), Ondrej Beranek (58th) and Filip Chlapik (59th) scored for the twelve-time world champion.
The 66-year-old German-Canadian group took over the position of national coach from predecessor Toni Söderholm, who surprisingly switched to SC Bern last November but is no longer in office there. For years, Kreis had been the next national ice hockey coach. But something always came up. “I had already given up hope,” said the 64-year-old recently. The ex-national player did not get his clubs’ approval twice. “I wouldn’t call it a dream,” says Kreis after a moment’s thought, “but it’s a wish that came true on the third try.”
Kreis himself had played 891 players for the Adler Mannheim in just under 20 years, he played for the national team at eight world championships and two Olympic Games. Kreis’s first world championship as head coach begins on May 12 in Tampere against Sweden.