WINIH Blog

April 9, 2013.

OTTAWA – Anna Shibanova's power-play goal early in the third period broke a scoreless tie and sent Russia to a 2-0 win over Finland to take the bronze medal at the 2013 Women's World Championship.

The Finns were undone by poor shooting and scored only one goal in their final four games of the tournament.

Nadezhda Alexandrova stopped all 32 shots for the victors.

Russia has now won only its second WW medal ever, the last coming in 2001 (bronze). "It's incredible," said 40-year-old Yekaterina Pashkevich, the only member of this year's team who also won bronze 12 years ago. "It's been a long time. And now with Sochi next, we're so excited. We're going to be very competitive there."

The Russians lost only one game all tournament, that in the semi-finals against Canada, and they were inspired by their new general manager, former NHLer Alexei Yashin, who brought in a new head coach and half a dozen fresh faces from last year's team.

"I wouldn't call it pressure, but there were expectations we had, for sure," Pashkevich admitted. "They put a lot of trust in us that we could win a medal."

In the other dressing room, goalie Noora Raty expressed immense disappointment in her team's inability to put the puck in the net. "We scored only five goals in six games," she said. "You can't win like that. It's frustrating watching your team have chance after chance and they can't put the puck in the net. It comes down to will, and I feel like we didn't have that will today. All our shots were easy saves for their goalie."

The first period was calm and tame. Although Finland had a significant advantage in puck possession, Alexandrova wasn’t forced to make many difficult saves. At the other end, Raty faced only four harmless shots.

The best chance of the period came when Olga Sosina made a gorgeous stretch pass to Iya Gavrilova to spring her alone on Raty. Gavrilova, though, blasted a shot high and wide.

Both teams had one power play a piece but nothing much came of either man advantage opportunity.

The second period was also scoreless and not much more dramatic. Neither goalie had to make a great save as defence ruled the day. There were turnovers aplenty between the blue lines and in the offensive end teams shot without much accuracy.

So, for the second time in as many days the Finns headed to the dressing room after two periods in a 0-0 game.

The Russians started the final period of regulation with a power play and couldn't score, but soon enough they had another man advantage, and this time they capitalized. Shibanova's hard slap shot from the top of the circle beat Raty cleanly to the far side at 4:11, and the bronze-medal game had its first goal.

"I didn't see it," Raty said. "Our defenceman was screening me totally. It caught me by surprise."

Four minutes later the Finns had a sensational chance to tie the game. Michelle Karvinen skated in over the Russian blue line, and right in front of her defenceman Pashkevich lost her footing and fell, giving the Finn a clear path to the goal. Karvinen out-deked herself, though, and ran out of room to get a good shot off.

Alexandra Vafina closed out the scoring with an empty netter with 15.8 seconds remaining.

"We've been in training since March 10, and we've worked so hard. We just said to ourselves in the second intermission that we have to leave everything out there," Pashkevich said. "We could not come off the ice after the game knowing we hadn't done everything we could to win."

"Games like these often come down to the power play," Raty noted, "and our power play was absolutely awful. It was frustrating to watch."

ANDREW PODNIEKS     (Our  thanks to IIHF.com)

The CR are new to this top level of world championship competition for the 2013 games. They won the Division 1 World Championship last year to qualify for 2013 World Championshp.

Czech Republic vs. Sweden
Sat April 6^th 2013 Relegation Round

Captain Alena Polenska's blog on the game:

The second game against Sweden was much more difficult for us than the first one. There were several reasons for that. One of them was our attitude. The first game against Sweden was in a way a bit easier. We knew we were the underdogs of the tournament and not much was expected from us. Thus, we could only surprise, and so we did.

However, the second game was much more difficult, especially as far as mental preparation goes. The day before we lost to Germany and missed the quarterfinals. It was hard for us to stand back up after a tough loss to Germany but we knew we had to find the strength within us to fight again.

Our teammates we discussed different options of how to get the team ready for the next game. We were trying to find a way how to bring up the team mood, and how to find a way to come together for few more games after the disappointment of the last two losses.  The decision was to remember why we started playing hockey, and why do we still play despite the fact that we do not gain anything from it except some injuries and lots of bruises. The most important thing is the pure joy of playing the game of hockey with great teammates.

Thus, before our off ice warm up, we sat down as a team and asked everyone to close their eyes and remember the day they started playing hockey. For some of us it was longer ago than for others (haha). We tried to remember the days of our first steps on the ice, first games. Also, we remembered how we stuck to hockey when things were hard. We asked everyone to think about why did they not give up on hockey?! And the answers were not spoken out loud but every one of us answered in her head. Despite of the hard conditions many of us have experienced on and off the ice, we all stuck with hockey because we love it! We were hoping that shifting the focus away from the pressure and stress, the need to win, will help us to ease up a bit and enjoy the game.

We still knew that we needed to win, and there was no doubt about it but we didn’t want to be tied up by the pressure. After this small visualizing activity, we conducted one more team activity, in which each player reminded herself or her teammates what makes her or them succeed in hockey.

Thus, we were mentally ready for the game. Although, Sweden was able to get the first goal, we did not give up and kept fighting back. We (Editor’s note: Polenska scored the goal) were able to get that one goal to tie up the game. The overtime did not start ideally for us; Sweden quickly put pressure in the first seconds of the overtime. There was a controversial situation, when Sweden asked for video referee; however, the referee said it was no goal.

We picked it up after that, and the energy was high on both sides. Players were fighting to get the goal but also playing responsibly in order not to give up any. We could have ended the game when we had a two-man advantage towards the end of the five-minute overtime but we did not shoot enough.

So the game had to be decided in the shootout, the last Swedish player pulled some fancy moves to end the game in their favor.

Sweden 2 Czech Republic 1 in Shoot Out.