VÄXJÖ / Stockholm. Lulea was calm when Växjö won their first quarter-final 2-0.
After the match, Thomas “Bolan” Berglund saw the schedule.
It’s an unreasonable schedule, says Lulea coach V.C. Moore.
While Växjö won the SHL, Luleå finished 10th. Anything other than a victory for Växjö would have come as quite a shock.
But it took half the game before the home team broke even. Joel Persson scored 1-0 in the powerplay and finally had the majority of the 5077 people at Vida Arena cheer.
“I’m not very used to it standing there (on the left) but I clicked it and it went into the crank, I think,” Pearson tells C More.
Växjö continued to be the team’s best of the match and although the next goal shone with his long absence, the team secured a victory. Ludwig Nilsson made it 2-0 in an empty net with 42 seconds left.
Harsh criticism of the schedule
The next game in the series will be played in Luleå on Saturday and Luleå coach Thomas Berglund believes his team did not get much rest during and after the games against Oskarshamn.
– The game program is set so that you have to play Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. Can’t you put a day between them like before? I find that strange, he says in C More.
– If you want to give the playing teams a chance, you have to let them rest and recover, but for now it’s the same. It was a bit of a strange schedule, he was really hard with matches.
Berglund not only wants to blame the table, but…
– It’s an unreasonable schedule. In the past, you’ve had at least one day between matches. Now you have to play again from Monday to Tuesday. He says recovery will not be good.