I had the pleasure to mention that I was standing at “Djurgården mot Västerås på Hovet” on a Friday evening.
Was this how Agne Jälevik felt when he introduced the Sportnytt feature in 1993?
Years pass.
30 years ago, in the 1992/1993 season, Västerås was the best team in Sweden.
At least in the regular season the team, with top players like Tommy Salo, Robert Nordmark, Peter Popovic, Lev Rohlin, Mishat Fkhrutdinov and Sergey Fokin, won in impressive style before losing to eighth-placed Djurgarden in the quarter-finals. .
If there is any year that Västerås wins SM gold, it will likely be that year.
We are now writing the 2022/2023 season and just before I go to Hovet, I promised myself to try to look ahead and not mention Mats Ytter once in the text.
Few things can shake up my sexual desire in ice hockey like a classic encounter between Djurgården and Västerås in a rickety Hooft on Friday night.
Freshly silenced, I and 8,000 other people went to see the premiere of what is being described as the best Allsvenskan hockey game ever.
SSK couldn’t be worse
Djurgården will be back right away, but the big difference in the series this season compared to last season is that we have a little better.
AIK has warmed up and can get a boost now that they’ve managed to wreak havoc near their arch-rival, Björklöven made a nice budget and with the help of that, Per Kenta’s ice hockey claws sharpened his team.
SSK couldn’t be worse, Kristianstad has matured for a year and is a poor, hard-to-play side, MoDo looks decently healthy and has Karlin, Västerås has received some offensive poison darts and the club is starting a fresh effort to get back into Sweden’s top series by 2024.
welcome to the Jungle.
After good old scraps of paper, Djurgården’s long voyage (it will fail, metaphorically, as on the last voyage) got off to a good start with good help from their opponents.
The new disciplined Västerås didn’t watch the smoke, and instead went out and played like the Tucson Roadrunners and incurred ejection after ejection.
Olle Liss whipped in a 1-0, 2-0, 3-0 came when Jimmie Jansson took five minutes to go up, which was a tough decision.
Had Marcus Krueger buttoned up his helmet and hadn’t worn it for three quarters, it might not have passed again.
The match could have already ended after the first half but we stayed 3-0 and only when Johan Gustafsson took the penalty from Noah Ostlund a few minutes into the second did Vick enter the match.
Once inside, Djurgården is gone from there, and everyone knows the hardest thing is to lead 3-0 in ice hockey…Allsvenskan.
Alexander Loncho scored 3-1 in tennis, the score came 3-2 after 46 seconds in an accurate fashion when Anton Svensson found Ludwig Gardiskog free in front of goal.
Jocke Fagervall took a timeout, but didn’t get much better.
He has a good second league
At the start of the last half, Vasteras had a golden opportunity to equalize in a long 5v3 match, but despite the compact pressure against Karl Lindbaum in goal, the open positions never appeared.
Once Djurgården corrected the numerical flaw and got all the players on the ice, they quickly came in for a change first in a long time and then narrowed.
No one has had time to see what happened, but in the replay we saw Olle Liss, the man with the whip, used the double-barreled Björbo pistol again.
That’s a terrible shot he got, no.
4-2 became 5-2 and Djurgården took the first victory against 8000 more or less drunk gunmen.
On several occasions I looked around and thought that… this is a great second league we have in Swedish ice hockey, I wonder if any other ice hockey country could show something similar?
Västerås arrived with six buses and it’s clear that the premiere and payday on Friday raised the mood and alcohol levels a bit.
Now there are only 51 rounds left before the seriousness begins, on the way to that final this spring there are both stumble wires and pitfalls, teams will change and strengthen during the regular season but in the end I wonder if the biggest threat won’t be Djurgården themselves.
At least now that Mats Ytter has retired.