German selection eager for the start of the tournament / Final squad will follow on Thursday
The coaching team left the team dinner on Tuesday evening early. Marco Sturm and his assistant coaches Geoff Ward, Tobias Abstreiter, Christian Künast and goalie coach Patrick Dallaire ultimately had more important things to do: The coaches took a close look at host Latvia in their only test match before the Olympic qualification (September 1st - 4th) against Denmark .
Especially after the short-term change of coach for the home team, those responsible for the German team wanted to gather as much information as possible about Sunday's opponents. However, the Latvians' 0-3 defeat at their dress rehearsal in front of their own audience was more of a side note. Sturm and Co were more concerned with sounding out the opponent's (new) tactics.
The result of Latvia's preparatory game was hardly an issue among the national team anyway. The focus is solely on tomorrow's match. After almost ten days of training, two test matches and a subsequent session on Wednesday afternoon, the national players are slowly but surely scraping their feet. “It’s already tingling,” asked Patrick Hager from the Kölner Haien on behalf of the rest of his teammates and added: “It’s time for it to finally get started.”
What exactly tomorrow's line-up will look like is still up in the air. Marco Sturm is not yet ready to announce his final squad. The national coach will only announce his final squad on Thursday afternoon before the opening game against the Japanese, trained by ex-DEL coach Greg Thomson (14.30 p.m., live on SPORT1). Sturm must have announced the 23 players (three goalkeepers, 20 players) to the tournament management by two hours before the game.
The only thing that is certain is that two players will still have to travel home. As always, it was not an easy decision for the national coach, as he emphasized before the World Cup in May: “These are exactly the situations that are most difficult for me as a coach.”