Coaches comment the semi final Canada-Czech Republic

Vladimir Ruzicka, Head Coach - Czech Republic

“First of all I would like to congratulate Team Canada for the win. We started the game really well, we put Canada under pressure and we had a couple of great chances, but then we have made a bad mistake unfortunately which cost us a goal and meant a lead for our opponent. From then on Canada took over a little bit and put us under pressure. In the second we tried really hard, but they scored another goal to their 2-0 lead and from that point they protected the lead playing really good defense. In the third Canada obviously kept focusing on their defense trying to capitalize on big counterattacks, but we were lucky we didn’t get scored on. I want to say thank you to my players for showing character and playing the way the team did in this game.”

Todd McLellan, Head Coach - Canada

“This Czech team played the way we thought they will, they pushed us skating hard for the first 5-7 minutes. We had a 55-minute-game and the certainly had a 5-minute-game. We’re lucky that Mike Smith made some saves that allowed us to get into the game. I thought that this was a heavy game, a hard game, a strong game and that’s what we thought the way the Czech team plays. We haven’t played like that for a while, probably the last time we played with them so it took us a little while to figure it out again. It wasn’t a free flowing type of game that we played, it was probably more like an NHL game in many ways. Once that we got going we got some very good opportunities to score and take the lead. Heading into the third period we didn’t want to just turn into a checking team, we thought that we could continue to go after them and it turned out to be a little bit more perhaps too much checking. It was a good sign for us, we’ve been able to win games scoring goals and today we won a game checking and with great goaltending. Hopefully that set us up moving forward whoever we play tomorrow.”

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