Finnish Lions bring home bronze medal after 4-0 shutout against Sweden

Eventual World Champions Russia much too good in semi-final

print this

Finland’s hockey team came away from the 72nd IIHF World Championships in Halifax and Quebec City with bronze medals after a 4-0 shutout victory against local rivals Sweden on Saturday.
      The medal is Finland’s tenth at this level, and means that Canadian head coach Doug Shedden, who hands over to his deputy Jukka Jalonen after this tournament, need not leave his post empty-handed.
     
The bronze medals were a just reward for a feisty showing on Saturday, in which two names stood out: goaltender Niklas Bäckström had his best game of the tournament and thwarted all 36 Swedish attempts on goal, while rookie Antti Pihlström* crowned a successful fortnight with two goals to end up with 5+2 for the championships.
      Pihlström scored the opener, and he added the decisive third goal at the beginning of the third period. In between Janne Niskala had made it 2-0 after 13:44 of the first period, and Sweden had laid siege to the Finnish goal for practically all of the second 20-minute spell, outshooting the Finns 11 to 2.
      Until Antti Pihlström grabbed the third goal, victory and a medal looked anything but certain and depended almost entirely on desperate defending and a clutch of big saves from Niklas Bäckström.
     
With a few minutes left on the clock, the Swedes pulled their goalie Stefan Liv, and Mikko Koivu delivered the death-blow into an empty net.
      Liv will not look back on the game as his finest hour: as the Swedes piled it on to no avail, their goalie faced only 12 shots all match, and he saw the puck go past him three times.
      Bronze was really the best the Finns could have hoped for from this tournament - the Canadians and Russians were altogether too good and they earned their right to dispute the final.
     
Friday’s match against Russia saw an unfamiliar feature among the opposition players: they fought one-for-all and all-for-one as a real team, and did not slip into their usual cardinal sin of "big egos trying to go it alone".
      As a result they looked like the world-beaters of old, and this was later reflected in their overtime victory over Canada in the final.
      Even so, they would not have had such an easy ride against the Finns - or such a decisive scoreline - without some fatal errors by the opposition, which were ruthlessly converted into a 2-0 lead after the first two periods.
      Sergei Fedorov’s opener was a textbook counter-attack goal after the Russians broke 3-1, following a turnover of Saku Koivu as the Finns pressed forward.
     
When the Russian goalie Yevgeni Nabokov resisted everything that the Finnish forwards could throw at him in return, the Finns needed every advantage they could grab to get back into the match in the last 20 minutes, and conceding two foolish team penalties for having too many players on the ice was exactly the wrong way of doing it.
      The Russians duly converted the second of their powerplay opportunities for 3-0 at 52:15, and scored a fourth into an empty net to complete the rout.
      It must have been acutely satisfying for them: a year ago, the Finns had crushed their ambitions in front of a fanatical home crowd with a 2-1 overtime victory in the semi-finals in Moscow.
     
The final in Quebec City on Sunday was an eagerly-awaited encounter between clearly the two best sides in the tournament, and it was a thriller that went right down to the wire.
      Russia came back from 4-2 down in the third period to win in overtime with a 62:42 powerplay strike from the hugely talented enfant terrible Ilya Kovalchuk, who also scored the equaliser with five minutes of regulation time remaining.
      The clinching Russian goal came as a four-on-three while Canada’s first-line winger Rick Nash was sitting out a penalty for delaying the game.
      Atlanta Thrashers star Kovalchuk was missing for the Russia-Finland semi-final, serving a one-match suspension for his second game misconduct penalty of the tournament.
      He had also failed to score in his other seven appearances, in spite of coming to the World Championships as the second-highest goalscorer in the NHL regular season, with 52 goals and a further 35 assists.
     
So the old curse of the hosts continued: it is 22 years since the last occasion when the nation hosting the World Championships emerged triumphant.
      Then it was the Soviet Union, and now Canada’s hopes of breaking the jinx were dashed by a resurgent Russia, who have spent some years in the wilderness, at least by their high standards.
      This was their first title since 1993, and only their head coach Vyateslav Bykov - on the ice fifteen years ago - knew the feeling of having a gold winner's medal draped around his neck. Last year Russia took bronze, but as recently as 2004 they were down in the basement - in an ignominious 10th place.
     
The Finns can be fairly satisfied with the outcome, and especially with the way younger players came good to replace the anticipated withdrawals of older names such as Teemu Selänne (who announced he was retiring from the international game after the Sweden match), or skipper Ville Peltonen and Montreal Canadiens captain Saku Koivu, both veterans of Finland's only World Championship title in 1995.
      Perhaps out of deference to old icons, few of the TV-pundits expressed it directly, but in the later stages of this tournament, it was the newcomers like Pihlström and Niskala and Sami Lepistö - together with the pairing of Mikko Koivu (4+5) and Tuomo Ruutu (4+2) - that shone more brightly than the established NHL stars.
     
It is quite likely that next year in Switzerland and no later than the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the impending change-of-generation will result in a radically different line-up wearing the Finnish colours.
      Hopefully it will also be a team that can score as well as it can defend: this time Finland topped the penalty-killing statistics (and indeed the number of penalty-minutes taken), but finished only 12th of 16 in terms of scoring efficiency, and 11th in terms of goals scored on the powerplay.

     
     
2008 World Championships:
      Best Goaltender: Yevgeni Nabokov, Russia
      Best Defenseman: Brent Burns, Canada (3 + 6, +14 for the tournament)
      Best Forward: Dany Heatley, Canada (12 + 8 for the tournament)
      MVP: Heatley, Canada
     
Media All-Star Team:
      Goaltender - Nabokov; Defensemen - Mike Green (Canada), Tomas Kaberle (Czech Republic); Forwards - Heatley, Alexander Ovechkin (Russia), Rick Nash (Canada).
     
Top 10 Scorers:
      Heatley (12+8=20), Ryan Getzlaf (Canada, 3+11=14), Nash (6+7=13), Alexander Semin (Russia, 6+7=13), Mattias Weinhandl (Sweden, 5+8=13), Alexander Ovechkin (Russia, 6+6=12), Sergei Fedorov (Russia, 5+7=12), Mike Green (Canada, 4+8=12), Phil Kessel (USA, 6+4=10), Derek Roy (Canada, 5+5=10) ... 16th. Mikko Koivu (Finland, 4+5=9) ... 26th. Antti Pihlström (Finland, 5+2=7).
     
     
*Note: Antti Pihlström was actually on the Finnish roster at the 2007 World Championships in Moscow, but his player-pass was never registered and he was not selected to play even a minute of the tournament, though he did collect a silver medal with the other team-members.


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Finland edge into semi-finals after 3-2 OT win over USA (15.5.2008)

Links:
  2008 IIHF World Championships (Wikipedia)
  Game Summary, Finland-Sweden
  Game Summary, Finland-Russia

Helsingin Sanomat