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Good performance not rewarded: Team Europe has to admit defeat to top favorite Canada in the first game of the final series (best-of-three) with 1:3. But the team does not have much time to recover, because the next match against Team Canada is scheduled for Friday night (1.55:1 a.m. live on SPORTXNUMX). The European selection must win this to force a third game.
Despite the early goal by Brad Machand (3rd), the team around the six German national players got off to a good start and dominated the game for a long time. In the first period alone, the European players fired 13 shots at the Canadian goal, but were initially unable to overcome Carry Price. Instead, Steven Stamkos took advantage of a build-up error by the European back line in the 14th minute and put Team Canada two points ahead with his first goal of the tournament.
Undeterred, Team Europe continued to work and increased the pressure. And this should pay off: The winning goal scorer of the semi-final, Thomas Tatar (28th), scored the 1-2 goal after being assisted by national player Dennis Seidenberg.
However, a compact European team was unable to find a way past the Olympic champions' keeper in the final period. Patrice Bergeron scored the 1:3 decision from a European perspective with his goal ten minutes before the end of the match.
Coach Ralph Krueger: "I think we took a bit too many risks in some of the wrong places and Canada knows how to take advantage of these situations and score goals. What we can take away from this game is the courage that we played a strong game and that we had a lot of good opportunities, but ultimately we just didn't make enough of them. I'm proud of how we got into the game and dominated it at times. We showed that we can win against Canada, but for that to happen, everything has to go perfectly and that wasn't the case in all areas today. Despite that, we did a lot of things right, tried a lot and that's something we can build on in Game 2."