Oilers defeated Classic with 6–4 goals in the seventh match of the F-League final match series at Hakametsä ice hall in Tampere.
SpongeBob Forsberg,
Jussi Jäkälä
28.4. 20:37•Updated 28.4. 21:55
The Oilers are celebrating their first men’s floorball Finnish championship in 18 years.
The Espoo team defeated Classic 6–4 in the seventh match of the F-League final match series at the Hakametsä ice hall in Tampere.
Classic still led the match in the 52nd minute 4–3, but then the point king of the playoffs, Oilers’ Justus Kainulainen.
First, he tied the score at 4-4 with a power play, and scored the winning goal just 52 seconds before the final buzzer. Aaro Astala embellished the final readings a moment later.
Kainulainen scored a hat-trick in the match and raised his total number of goals for the season to 78, which is the F-League single-season goal record.
In the playoffs, Kainulainen produced wild results 26+10=36.
The Classic won the first two games of the playoff series, after which the Oilers came within a win of the championship. Classic, however, stretched the solution to a stalemate with Saturday’s 9–4 win.
The Oilers’ previous championship was from the 2005–2006 season, when the now 25-year-old Kainulainen was just a little boy.
– It tastes incredibly good. I still can’t believe this. Maybe at some point it will come to mind, what has been done. We have a really fantastic gang here, Kainulainen said.
– There have been difficult moments and a lot of half-assed guys, but it’s a tough group. I’m damn proud of every dude.
This is how the match went
Classic controlled the ball in the opening set, Oilers blocked and relied on counterattacks.
The people of Espoo started scoring in the 7th minute, when Heikki Iiskola scored a goal from Aaro Astala’s cross pass. Classic equalized in 13:36 when left free Konsta Tykkyläinen shot in from the front corner.
Iiskola took the Oilers into the lead again with his second hit of the night, just moments after Classic’s equalizer. However, the people of Tampere once again equalized when the captain Janne Lamminen managed to score for the first time in the spring playoffs.
At the beginning of the second period, the scorer of the playoffs, Justus Kainulainen, gave the Oilers a 3–2 lead when Oskari Heikkilä sat on the ice bench.
A couple of minutes before the end of the second period, Heikkilä found Classic with his pass Emelin Salinwhich brought the Classic back up to par.
In the third period, Classic took the lead for the first time with Eemeli Salini’s second hit of the night, when it was able to play five against three right in the opening minute. At this point, the readings were 4–3 for Classic.
Ten minutes later, it was Oilers and Kainulainen’s turn to inoculate with a two-man advantage, when Toni Salminen and Salin broke Kainulais in for a short time, and the game was 4–4.
– The final set was a rollercoaster of emotions. There was a gap for both teams and Classic seemed to gain momentum, but then we got the upper hand and tied the game. The end was a pretty tight game, luckily we managed to dig out a goal at the end, Kainulainen said.
Updated at 21:54: Corrected Kainulainen’s playoff power points to 26+10 instead of the previous 26+9.