The U20 national team lost the final game at the U20 Summer Challenge in Poprad (Slovakia). The team led by the coaching team Tobias Abstreiter and Toni Söderholm lost to the Czech Republic 3:4 (0:1, 1:2, 2:0, 0:1) after extra time.
In the first third, the Czech team created more chances and took the lead with Simon Jelinek's goal in the 16th minute. The German team showed improvement again, but had to concede a second goal in the 28th minute: Erik Cermak scored to make it 2-0 for the Czech Republic after work from Jonas Peterek and Ondrej Psenicka. But the German answer followed within a minute: Yannik Valenti scored the next goal with his own advantage after preparatory work by Justin Schütz and Taro Jentzsch. In the 35th minute, however, Miroslav Kukla on the other side restored the Czechs' two-goal lead.
In the final section, the team led by the coaching team Tobias Abstreiter and Toni Söderholm showed a lot of morale. First, the U20 national players survived being twice outnumbered. Later Dennis Lobach brought them DEB-Selection was back within striking distance with his goal (54th). Two minutes before the end, Yannik Valenti finally scored the much celebrated equalizer with his second goal of the day. In extra time he failed DEB-Selection made a substitution error, which resulted in a situation of being outnumbered and Miroslav Kukla promptly conceded a goal. The U20 national team lost to the Czech Republic 3:4 after extra time and finished the tournament in fourth place.
Tobias Abstreiter, U20 national coach: “We saw a committed performance from our team today! The boys showed morale after falling behind and came back again. The substitution mistake in extra time was obviously annoying, but we have to avoid that in the future. We improved from game to game over the course of the tournament and were able to see a real learning process among the players. You now know what is required internationally and we as a coaching team were able to pick up some insightful things that need to be discussed. We will now work on these things together in order to be prepared for future challenges.”
You can find all the statistics for the game HERE.