Olympic Men’s Hockey Tournament – Page 3

On the strength of Sakari Manninen’s first-period winner, Finland advanced to its second Olympic gold medal game in history with a hard-fought 2-0 victory over Slovakia on Friday.

“Going to the Olympic final is like a dream,” said Manninen, one of 17 KHLers on the seasoned Finnish roster.

Coach Jukka Jalonen’s troops will face the winner of the ROC-Sweden semi-final for international hockey’s biggest prize on Sunday at Beijing’s National Indoor Stadium.

“If you want to win these types of games, you have to defend and I think we did that extremely well,” Jalonen said. “There was not very much room for the Slovak forwards. It’s one of our strengths, but we would have liked to play a little better offensively.”

Shots favoured Slovakia 28-27 in the first semi-final. Both goalies were strong, but Slovakia’s Patrik Rybar just made one more mistake than his Finnish counterpart Harri Sateri, who got his first Olympic shutout.

Harri Pesonen sealed the deal with an empty-netter with 39 seconds remaining.

The Finns, who won the 2019 Worlds and earned silver at the 2021 Worlds, own two Olympic silver medals (1988, 2006) and four bronze medals (1994, 1998, 2010, 2014). They’re aiming for a happier result on Sunday than their 3-2 final loss to Sweden in 2006 on Nicklas Lidstrom’s famous early third-period goal. (In 1988 in Calgary, the Olympic tournament featured a round-robin format.)

“It’s a pretty special day,” said Pesonen. “I knew coming into the Olympics that we’d have a good, solid team, a veteran team with a lot of experienced guys, but every tournament is a mystery [in terms of] how it goes and how it ends.”

Despite the loss, the underdog Slovaks can be incredibly proud. Nobody foresaw the ninth-ranked team in the IIHF Men’s World Ranking cracking the final four in 2022. And coach Craig Ramsay’s team still has a shot at Slovakia’s first Olympic medal ever on Saturday.

“I am so sad right now, but we have to forget about this because we have our next game tomorrow and we have to take the [bronze] medal,” said Rybar.

This was a grinding, defensive duel, which suited Finland well. However, the Slovaks battled hard until the bitter end. They showed the doubters that they weren’t emotionally drained at this point in their Cinderella run. Slovakia was miles better than in its opening 6-2 loss to these same Finns.

Juraj Slafkovsky, the 17-year-old Slovak phenom who plays for TPS Turku in Finland, entered this semi-final with five goals, tied for the Olympic lead with Sweden’s Lucas Wallmark. Ramsay elevated Slafkovsky to the top line with captain Marek Hrivik and Peter Cehlarik, who scored the late equalizer and the shootout winner respectively in the 3-2 quarter-final win over the Americans.

“I think we had some offensive chances when we held the puck in their end,” Slafkovsky said. “But you know, when luck isn’t on your side, like it was the last game, then it’s tough. Tomorrow, I hope we’ll have luck on our side.”

The only pre-2022 Olympic game between these two nations with populations of approximately 5.5 million was Finland’s 5-3 victory in the 2010 bronze medal game. In Vancouver, Finland rallied from a 3-1 third-period deficit as Olli Jokinen scored the equalizer and the go-ahead goal and Valtteri Filppula – Finland’s Beijing captain – added an empty-netter. Slovakia’s fourth-place finish marked its Olympic peak.

Here, the gritty, veteran Finns bided their time, awaiting a Slovak error. Even though Slovakia generated some good pressure, Manninen found a chink in their armour at 15:58. With traffic in front, the diminutive, crafty centre tipped Petteri Lindbohm’s long shot and tucked the rebound underneath Rybar’s right pad for a 1-0 lead.

“We got a shot from the blueline, traffic in front of the net, a little tip and then there was a rebound, and that’s always a dangerous chance to score,” Manninen said.

It was Manninen’s fourth goal of these Games. He’s tied with linemate and Salavat Yulayev Ufa linemate Teemu Hartikainen for the team lead with seven points, and both are in contention for the tournament scoring title. Manninen also had a hat trick against Slovakia in the opener. At the 2019 Worlds, Manninen led the golden Finns in Bratislava with 11 points.

Early in the second period, Hrivik swooped in and had Sateri beaten when he went to the forehand, but put the puck off the side of the net. Slovakia fired shots at Sateri from all angles, but couldn’t faze him.

“It was a tough battle but we did a great job as a team defending in the middle,” said the Finnish goalie. “We kept them outside, so the guys helped me a lot today.”

Careless, back-to-back tripping penalties by Peter Ceresnak and Pavol Regenda gave Finland a 5-on-3 man advantage for 1:13. But despite good Finnish offensive-zone possession, the Slovaks succeeded in killing it off. Rybar denied Manninen from the slot on Suomi’s best chance.

At one point, a scrum along the boards behind the Slovak net wore for on for more than 30 seconds. Neither team was doing this the easy way.

Ramsay gave the Finns their due: “They clogged up the neutral zone and, more important, I think, was the play in their own end. We just had real trouble with them because they were so strong and so quick.”

The third period started off with another ineffective Finnish power play, and Slafkovsky and Michal Kristof generated a 2-on-1 rush just before it expired, but couldn’t cash in. Mid-period, a strong backcheck by 19-year-old Slovak defender Samuel Knazko (the World Junior captain in 2021 and 2022) disrupted Finnish veteran Leo Komarov’s promising drive to the net.

The Finns withstood Slovakia’s late push with veteran professionalism after Rybar was pulled with 1:38 left. Pesonen took no chances on his empty-net goal, steering the puck in from point-blank range.

“It wasn’t the prettiest game today but we won it,” said Finnish assistant captain Marko Anttila, who became a folk hero with his huge playoff goals in the 2019 gold-medal run.

“It is a tough pill to swallow,” Hrivik said. “We had them under a lot of pressure but could not score.”

After masterminding two IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship gold medals (2011, 2019) and a home-ice World Junior title (2016), Jalonen’s stature as the greatest Finnish coach ever is already sealed. If his squad triumphs in Beijing, this Finnish Hockey Hall of Famer indubitably belongs in the conversation with Canada’s Mike Babcock and the Soviet Union’s Viktor Tikhonov.

In Beijing, the Finnish women won bronze for the second straight Olympics with a 4-0 blanking of Switzerland. Now Finland’s men are hungry to capture an even shinier medal.

“It’s huge for everybody individually, as a team, and as a hockey country,” Sateri said. “It is a big thing.”

Slovakia owns four IIHF Ice Hockey World Championship medals all-time, including gold (2002), silver (2000, 2012), and bronze (2003). Winning any Olympic medal would send their fans into fits of joy in Bratislava and beyond. And that should give Ramsay’s men motivation aplenty in the bronze game.

“It is a chance to showcase how Slovak hockey has moved forward,” said Ramsay. “This is an opportunity to show the world who we are.”

Arseni Gritsyuk, team ROC’s 20-year-old forward, kept his nerve to grab a shoot-out winner for the defending champion after a hard-fought semi-final against Sweden. The game was deadlocked at 1-1 after 60 minutes and neither team could decide it in overtime.

Sweden came close to claiming that shoot-out verdict. Lucas Wallmark and Joakim Nordstrom both managed to get the better of their CSKA Moscow clubmate Ivan Fedotov in the ROC net, meaning Yegor Yakovlev had to score to keep the defending champion in the tournament. The 2018 gold medallist did just that, and in sudden death Gritsyuk stepped up after two failures from Nikita Gusev. The Avangard Omsk youngster fired in off the post to give his team the verdict and send it to back-to-back Olympic finals for the first time since the Soviet era.

“I was to blame for the first goal, I lost the puck in their zone and then lost their player behind me,” said Gritsyuk. “In my heart, I felt like my mistake had hurt the whole team and I really wanted to put it right. I’m happy that Vanya Fedotov played so well and got us to the shoot-out.

“When it came to my turn, I went out and knew straight away what I was going to do – and you saw the result. If you keep turning over your shots in your thoughts, you can lose your head.”

Many head coaches would rely on experience in such circumstances, but Alexei Zhamnov never doubted that Gritsyuk could do it. “It was a collective decision,” he said. “Of course I understood the risk, and I took responsibility as the head coach.

“But we drew our conclusions from what we saw in practice, who looked good on penalty shots. We know who can score and who can’t. We thought that against the Swedish goalie this might work, and it did.”

And the youngster added that it wasn’t hard to keep his hands from trembling, pointing out that Yakovlev’s do-or-die attempt came under far greater pressure. “I love penalty shots, I take a lot of them,” he added. “I treat it like a one-on-one game, just me and the goalie. One of us wins, one of us loses.”

Yakovlev himself credited his psychologist with an assist on his shoot-out success. “To be honest, I don’t understand how I kept my nerves in check,” he said. “I just went out and took a shot. Thanks to my sports psychologist!”

Team ROC goes on to face Finland on Sunday for gold; Sweden must try to recover in time for Saturday’s bronze-medal game against Slovakia.

Captain Anton Lander was succinct. “It sucks, it really sucks. Right now, it sucks.”

His fellow forward Wallmark had more to say. “It was a tight game but I still think there were some scoring chances there,” he said. “It was two good teams and it sucks to lose it like that.

“I think both teams were playing their own systems and didn’t give up that many chances, but we had a couple and a chance to win the game and when there aren’t many, you have to take advantage of them.”

There were few changes from the quarter-final line-ups. Sweden put forward Gustav Rydahl onto the fourth line in place of defenceman Linus Hultstrom. Team ROC scratched Stanislav Galiev, with Kirill Semyonov taking his place alongside Vadim Shipachyov and Andrei Chibisov on the first line. Artur Kayumov returned to the team on the fourth.

Prior to the game, both teams promised a hard-fought battle with the emphasis on minimizing defensive errors and ensuring that nobody left the ice with any regrets. As a consequence, scoring chances were at a premium throughout this semi-final clash. There was particular attention for Wallmark, the CSKA Moscow forward who had scored in every game in Beijing so far. His KHL clubmate Fedotov snapped that streak and the Swedish sniper’s shoot-out tally was not enough for the Tre Kronor.

Team ROC shaded the opening stages, with Anton Slepyshev getting on a break down the left and firing in an angled shot that Johansson turned around the corner. However, that early momentum was disrupted by Andrei Chibisov’s offensive zone trip on Nordstrom which gave the Swedes the first power play of the game.

That two-minute spell offered little evidence of Swedish attacking prowess and the next big opportunity came when Chibisov jumped out of the box to get clear and test Johansson once again. For the most part, though, it was more about energy than creativity in the first 10 minutes.

Sweden came close to grabbing the lead in the 12th minute when a Lukas Bengtsson point shot came through traffic and took a deflection onto the post with Fedotov beaten. Max Friberg and Alexander Nikishin were battling on the slot for the vital touch, and the ROC goalie was grateful to hear the ‘ding’ of rubber on iron. The Tre Kronor had another good chance when an ROC attack broke down. Theodor Lennstrom led a two-on-one rush but Fredrick Olofsson’s shot went straight to Fedotov’s glove.

Team ROC ended the first period on a high, with Slava Voinov firing in a testing shot that caused confusion on the Swedish crease. And the men in red maintained that momentum through the intermission, returning to the game to open the scoring 15 seconds after the break.

As in the opening stages of the first period, it was Slepyshev collecting Pavel Karnaukhov’s long pass and moving down the left-hand channel. This time, the CSKA Moscow forward beat Christian Folin and walked to the net, where he executed a neat little backhand-forehand shuffle to beat Johansson at last. That was the first time Sweden had fallen behind in regulation time action here in Beijing.

Subsequently, Team ROC concentrated on further tightening its defensive effort and Sweden was limited to a few half chances as it looked to get back into the game. There was an anxious moment for Fedotov when Carl Klingberg went around the back and slung the puck right across the paint, but Mathieu Brome could not steer it home at the back door. However, for the most part, Alexei Zhamnov’s team did a good job of closing down the play and protecting its lead.

The Swedes are at their most dangerous when the defence is able to link up with the forwards. Going into the semi-final, Jonathan Pudas and Henrik Tommernes were among the team’s leading playmakers. And it was those two who combined to deliver the tying goal in the 47th minute. Pudas fired in a point shot that Tommernes redirected into Fedotov’s pads from close range. As the puck bounced free, Lander reacted first and the Swedish captain gleefully slotted home a vital goal.

“I think we played a good game,” said defeated coach Johan Garpenlov. “We’re happy with the way we played, we felt we were better during the game, we had more chances but we didn’t find a way to score than one goal. Then again, [ROC] is good defensively and have lots of gifted players, and they found a way.

“I thought we had a few [chances] there, especially in the third period but we didn’t score. That’s the way it goes sometimes.”

Now, discipline was crucial for both teams. Chances were even harder to come by and the puck spent much time up against the boards, attended by a scrum of players battling for every inch of the ice. As time ticked down, it became clear that either a moment of brilliance or an unexpected individual error was the most likely source of a winning goal in regulation. Shipachyov came close to delivering the former, bursting through on his own to force a big pad save from Johansson.

Team ROC has faced criticism at home for a lack of invention on offence and it’s fair to say that the class of 2022 is some way from the swashbuckling teams of old. However, defenceman Nikita Nesterov is more than happy with performances at both ends of the ice.

“It was a good game,” he said. “We played our game. I wouldn’t say we are just a defensive team. We play aggressive but we need to score more. Every game we’ve played better and we hope our best game will be the final.”

Overtime followed and Sweden was first to show with Lander carving out the first opening of the extras. Then Karnaukhov crashed the net – literally – as he bore down on Johansson at high speed, slamming his whole 96kg frame into the goal but leaving the puck behind.

The biggest chance of the extras went to Sweden. Only a stick thrust out at the vital moment by Vladimr Tkachyov prevented Brome from shooting at an open net as Fedotov got caught out of position by a swift raid on his goal.

Tkachyov later missed in the shoot-out, but Gritsyuk’s winner ensured he got full value for that brave defensive play. And ROC captain Shipachyov paid tribute to the youngster. “Even before the Olympics, I said that he was ready,” Shipachyov said. “Clearly, the kid has no nerves.”

Source: iihf.com