Ilves, who chased the championship with a terrible frenzy, did not know how to play with force, writes Urheilu’s news manager Pekka Aalto.
Lynx is out! The decades-awaited battle for Tampere has been cancelled!
Tappara and Pelicans will meet in the final matches of the SM league.
It’s hard to say which one is the bigger surprise: the Pelicans’ place in the finals or the Ilves’ scrimmage. It takes a while to digest both.
Since there is still time to open the pelican memory before the final series starting on Wednesday, let’s now focus on Ilves. What the hell happened? Was the team more of a social bubble than a real champion candidate?
At this point, there is really no other option but to pack for a while until the beginning of October, when the Ilves bosses decided to change Bunch of Myrrh Antti Pennaseen. There were reasons for the decision, but in retrospect you can judge that something inside the team broke.
I still don’t know if you can talk about a wrong decision.
At least it was wrong that Myrrä was not allowed in the locker room to say goodbye to the players. A clumsy trick could leave big scars.
Perhaps the club management didn’t think of it, that with the change of coach, league leader Ilves gathered enormous pressure. It was no longer a fresh challenger, but a calculating big club, whose failure many even hoped for after cold dismissals.
In Kaukalo, the expression based on quick reaction, turning the game and relaxed finishing disappeared towards the end. In the player base, fast cells were replaced by cents and kilos. The results were mostly good until the pick-up finally came on Thursday.
During the Myrrh, the tight Ilves scored numerous goals from the prey, but Pennanen’s Ilves became different. The problems culminated in the Pelicans series, where Ilves dominated events with some kind of version of big club hockey but was often not really dangerous.
Ilves scored one goal in the last two games of the match series. No wonder, it was born after the Tampere team’s exploitation on the blue line with a quick blow to the Pelicans back. The hit was straight from Jouko Myrrä’s playbook.
It may be kitchen psychology to say that Ilves wanted the championship too much. Let’s say it anyway.
The club has a great team and the best fans in Finland, who thirsted for gold more than anything else. A beloved puck player plays in the club Petri Kontiolafor which the missing championship was played in the bye season.
It seemed that even these things turned against the team over the course of the season. A great opportunity turned into a compulsion to win. Playing with Pako started to show first on Kontiola’s face and eventually everyone else’s.
The beautiful story was already written, but it never ended up on the big screen.