Finland has played in the floorball men’s World Cup until the end of its first group, and the result was two wins and one surprising loss to Switzerland. Switzerland won the group and therefore Finland will play in the quarterfinals on Friday night. Finland’s opponent will be Germany-Canada. Sweden can be met exceptionally already in Saturday’s semi-final.
Based on the opening series, there are a few big question marks in Finland’s game.
1. The totality of the field players and roles in the search
I find it unpleasant to criticize individual World Cup player choices. We outsiders have much less relevant information at our disposal than the team’s coaching management. We see what happens on the field, but we know almost nothing about the team’s internal dynamics and, in general, we are not responsible for the team’s role and, ultimately, the result. Coaching selects the best possible team for the World Championships based on its own vision and judgment.
However, we can assess whether there are many successful people in the team and whether we can get the best performance out of as many as possible. The tournament is still in progress and the most important games are coming up, but for now, playing with several players has fallen short of the usual level.
The start to the tournament has been particularly challenging for the less experienced WC visitors. Here, the focus is on the operating environment instead of individual players – is it easy for the players to jump in, is there a “longer hand” and support available to the players so that success would be more likely?
It doesn’t depend on the level of the players. We have to ask why the Swiss World Cup debutant, born in 2001 Noel Seiler immediately felt like a fish in water under the pressure of the home crowd, but Finland’s more inexperienced World Cup players have had challenges to perform with the quality they are familiar with in the F-League.
For example, a World Cup debutant, Joona Rantala the abilities are guaranteed to be sufficient for the World Championship level. However, his task is not made easier by the fact that the playing minutes of the debut tournament came in the first match as a left winger and in the second there were almost no minutes at all.
In the match against Norway that ended the preliminary group, Rantala was able to play on the right wing, probably partly due to absences, and even though the game was not top-notch from Finland, Rantala got a lot more out of it in a more familiar place.
In the Finnish national team, five players have been given a lot of responsibility for the five-a-side game. It has worked brilliantly, for example, in Prague 2018, when the body that has played together for a long time was superior in the rink. Now that the team has already started some sort of transition and important pieces, especially on the defensive end (Tatu Väänänen, Juha Kivilehto, Krister Savonen) has been sidelined for various reasons, it brings new challenges for the five.
You can no longer find clear club entities and now you feel that by searching for chain changes you will come across a winning combination.
2. Finland’s five-a-side game
If it was still difficult to assess the skills of the fresher national team faces, Finland’s organized attacking play against Switzerland also seemed difficult. Switzerland did not present anything new and surprising in their own defensive game, but Finland did not seem to find ways to create quality scoring situations in the 5v5 game.
Two of the Swiss pitches were grouped (from top to bottom) in a 1-2-2 formation and one pitch in a 2-2-1 formation. What they had in common was that Finland was hardly able to find ways to get to the center or “pockets” of the attack area.
Finland had to rely on long passes to the corners of the attack area, where Switzerland’s quite scrappy defenders were able to put a lot of pressure on and win the ball. In general, Finland’s longer shots with the ball remained in practice a harmless balling in the middle area.
Due to the lack of long offensive zone attacks, Finland was also unable to use follow-up presses. Also, the opening set of the match against Norway was the weakest against Finland in years. In the second period, Finland increased ball control and created a strong territorial superiority in the central area and at the same time managed to freeze Norway’s counterattacks almost completely, but there were still difficulties in getting into the shape of the defensive five.
Playing offensively in a losing position has been challenging for Finland from time to time before. The team has been at its best for a long time, when it has been able to play in the lead position and freeze the opponent with low-risk ball control and tight defensive play. In the losing position of the match against Switzerland, the attacking play remained toothless, but also in the defensive play, there was fumbling uncharacteristic for Finland.
In the Finnish national team, the field players bear great responsibility for their own five-man play. The challenges of the success of the younger national team faces were already explained above, but for the same reason, the five players also have new challenges.
When you have a playing partner next to you, with whom you don’t have many kilometers in common, and the place of play may also be foreign, generating a sufficiently high playing speed at the five-man level is not possible by snapping your fingers. It is good to hope that during the tournament, Finland will come across combinations that quickly find each other from the width of three fields.
3. The tournament is over
Despite the challenges mentioned above, the tournament is still very much in progress for Finland, and nothing has been lost except for the group win. When the ball is put in the middle in the semi-final stage, Finland has a lot of experience in the three players on the field – we can safely expect that the bat will not shake.
A good start, getting into the lead and then playing with your own identity is a tough piece for other countries chasing the world championship to break. After this, it can be stated that the weak Switzerland game was a necessary moment to check the course.
But. When the initial groups have been played, Finland starts from a small distance compared to the other three top countries – Sweden, Switzerland and the Czech Republic. In a single game, Finland is able to effectively disarm every team, but all signs point in the direction that Finland does not seem to rise above chance at this year’s World Cup.
Text: Perttu Kytöhonka
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