– who are you?
– I am the death.
– Will you come to pick me up?
– Well not yet, I just wanted to see what the bottom team is like in the SHL and do some pre-game reconnaissance, I’m the title sponsor for this spring…
The extremely unfavorable weather and snowfall in Albertville ’92 meant that unfortunately I never got away and it was a great pleasure to sit at the ice rink in Oskarshamn to follow the ice hockey bravado of Småland and to meet the Oskarshamn-HV71 at the bottom.
Instead, I’m sunk in front of the TV as Don Wennerholm, and it’s going well, especially for Mats, who must be one of all the active sports journalists today who watched the most ice hockey games on location.
A former Aftonbladet colleague, who now lives in Oskarshamn of all places, described it well during the day:
– I only saw Wennerholm in the editorial office when he walked in with a box full of travel bills.
Highway to Hell Hockeyallsvenskt
After just over a third into the regular season, it’s already starting to wind down, especially since many of the bottom teams will soon be gone and for teams that absolutely don’t want to belong at the bottom of the table, it’s time to win and move so they don’t get stuck.
The table may be even, but for a jumbo watching for points saves and a team pass, a second pass may be impossible to beat, which is required to avoid the beautiful and disconcertingly objective jumbo final – the highway to Hockeyallsvenskt Hell – towards the brink of spring.
With this situation, it is possible to find a lot of fun things to watch even a small ice hockey game on a Tuesday night in November.
Newcomer HV71 started the restart after the break with a solid and important victory over Malmö, Oskarshamn with a clear loss away to Luleå.
They also returned home north of Kalmarsund with a naked brawl tainted between the sports department and David Quenneville’s transatlantic poker ‘Q’, who on Monday caused a veritable mess of strife when he called the poke a ‘slap in the face’. In the local newspaper, the Baromtern.
Subsequently, IC More radio told IKO’s sporting director Thomas Fröberg that he had dealt another “slap in the face”, on the other cheek, when Fröberg invited the Canadian into his office, berated him and ordered him to apologize to the whole team.
No fingers in between and a refreshing shout out to us unbiased people who appreciate when people say what they think and think in Swedish ice hockey where everyone is mostly told not to think of anything, especially not of anyone else.
A few fingers away, it wasn’t at the start of a jumbo final that one participant scored the fewest goals in the series and one conceded the most.
The puck barely had time to release it, let alone pass the ball properly, and it certainly wasn’t shot, but on the other hand, it was directed into the goal by Finnish top scorer Ante Sumela, who was able to catch the stick forward with his compatriot Oksanen’s pass with an easy send-off. On irony. After only 13 seconds and a pathetically passive defensive game by HV.
We can’t ask for worse goalkeepers
The home side weren’t far from 2-0 soon after but instead of doubling the lead HV71 equalized and if Oskarshamn scored at the first change, HV71 scored at both.
At 1min 50sec they went from 1-0 to 1-3 Joe Kanata substituted HV was called back with headless play meaning Oskarshamn could shrink shortly before the first period break.
5-6 in shots, 2-3 in goals.
We couldn’t ask for much worse goalkeeping than that. At this level it was as if someone had stolen the trim and stuck grandma’s woven poinsettia to the crossbar.
After a completely disorganized start to the game, teams built small road posts between the goal and the midfield, only in the most recent period it was mitigated again when Oskarshamn played ice hockey for the Uddcomb Cup and donated three points to a down. fighter.
It came 2-4 after a crazy pass in their area by Suomela, 2-5 after an even worse pass from Pilö and that is exactly how the top five should not behave in a team of impending crisis.
A subtle detail in Oskarshamn’s crushing loss was that the previously feared game of numerical superiority, the one that was the best of the series and in which the prickly David “slaps in the face” Quenneville was a vital part, now seemed so silly.
When the final whistle blew in eastern Småland, HV71 were just one goal away from passing that jumbo spot to Oskarshamn, and the feeling is that the team, still feeling like a newcomer, is at the bottom to stay.
In their first season in the SHL Oskarshamn did not qualify due to a canceled Covid season, in the second year they finished 11th and last year they forced Rogl to a decisive seventh game in the quarter-finals.
This year they seem to have the closest thing to defensive Allsvenskan ice hockey and if Filander can’t overcome the sharpness and that leakage on defense, this could end really, really, badly.
– who are you?
– I’m Hockeyallsvenskan.