Legendary penalty goal: Marcel Noebels (l.) charges the Swiss Leonardo Genoni in 2021 and shoots the German ice hockey team into the World Cup semi-finals.
Photo: dpa/Roman Koksarov
Oh wonder! At the Ice Hockey World Cup, the German national team will once again face Switzerland in the quarter-finals (4:20 p.m.) this Thursday. Switzerland? There was something! 2021 in Riga. Penalty shootout. Marcel Noebels from the Eisbären Berlin is the last German shooter to glide across the ice. With a crazy trick, Noebels lets the Swiss goalkeeper Leonardo Genoni get out. The Germans win 3-2 and move into the semi-finals.
This time, “Noebi”, injured, has to watch his colleagues’ World Cup games from his hometown of Tönisvorst. He was still there at the 2023 World Cup when the German Ice Hockey Federation (DEB) team sent the Swiss home again with a 3-1 win after goals from Maximilian Kastner, John-Jason Peterka and Nico Sturm. Again in the quarter-finals, again in Riga. In 2021 it wasn’t enough to win a medal; two years later, silver was hanging around his neck. This time it is not Latvia that is hosting the World Cup, but the Czech Republic. So the game will be played in Ostrava, but the opponents are again the Swiss, who ended up in second place behind Canada after good performances in their preliminary group A.
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However, national coach Harold Kreis has no doubts about his team’s chances nor because of his own performance in the somewhat shaky 6-3 win in the last preliminary round game on Tuesday: “The French had the better start to the game, so we had a bit of trouble with that at the beginning . Our team then corrected that and controlled the target and the zones better. Then the goals came. The last 30 minutes were clearly ours.” A game like this, in which nothing is at stake, often looks easier from the outside than it is. »But it was really hard work. I think that the result was absolutely deserved, even in terms of size. The team has presented itself very well so far and we are going into the quarter-finals with a positive feeling.
Switzerland and Germany have a long ice hockey history, not just since the recent World Cup duels. Probably the longest in Europe: In total, the Swiss have crossed bats with the Germans in 155 international matches. There were also ten games between the GDR and Switzerland. For the first time, a Swiss and a German national team faced each other at the 1910 European Championships in Les Avants, three kilometers from Lake Geneva. Germany won 9:1. A year later at the European Championships in Berlin, the home team even won 11-0.
But those days are long gone. Since becoming runners-up in the World Championships in 2013, the Swiss have actually been considered the stronger team, but recently they have repeatedly failed in crucial moments against their German neighbors. The teams actually know each other inside out. And national coach Kreis could have his striker Dominik Kahun reveal the final details. He has been playing at SC Bern since 2020.
But it’s not just this quarter-final that promises high excitement. There will be a purely Scandinavian duel between Sweden and Finland. While the Finns more or less hobbled and stumbled their way into the top eight, the Swedes played big. They marched through the preliminary round with seven wins and sometimes impressed with a fantastic combination game. NHL professionals like Joel Eriksson Ek (Minnesota) and Erik Karlsson (Pittsburgh) put together an attack that was reminiscent of the once famous Moscow gala troika of Vladimir Krutov, Igor Larionov and Sergei Makarov.
The Swedes have at least 18 players from the North American NHL involved. Only the USA (23) and Canada (24) have more in their ranks. For the Germans there are five. The game between the hosts, the Czech Republic, against the USA is likely to be particularly interesting, as the local media had only expected the title before the start of the World Cup in somewhat cryptic terms. Although the Czechs also nominated all the professionals from North America they could get their hands on, they only managed third place in their preliminary group.
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