Home ice
May 7, 2010
As the host nation of the 2010 World Ice Hockey Championship, Germany is sure of at least one thing: they can't be much worse than they were at last year's tournament held in neighboring Switzerland.
Back then, a defeat by Switzerland in their second group stage game sent Germany into a tailspin. They finished the tournament 15th out of the 16 teams. Under normal circumstances, that would have seen Germany demoted to the second division of international competition.
But under the rules of the International Ice Hockey Federation, since Germany had already been named as the host of this year's tournament, they could not be relegated.
Germany didn't set the hockey world on fire at the Vancouver Olympics either, losing all four games. The results in exhibition games leading up to the tournament have been mixed at best, But head coach Uwe Krupp remains is cautiously optimistic.
"Our goal has to be the qualification round," said Krupp. "But over the past few years we have learned that we shouldn't look too far ahead."
German ice
Coach Krupp is hoping that home ice advantage will lift his team to bigger and better things. A crowd of more than 76,000 is expected to fill the soccer stadium in Gelsenkirchen for Germany's opening game against the United States on Friday. That would set a new world record for attendance at an ice hockey game. The rest of the tournament will be played in Cologne and Mannheim.
With a large crowd behind them, it is important for Germany to get off to a good start in the first game and set pace for the rest of the tournament, says Thorsten Weiss, who covers the national team for the German weekly hockey paper, the Eishockey News.
"The team is unstable, we know that," said Weiss in an interview with Deutsche Welle. "[The team] demonstrated this at past world championship, over and over again. Whenever there are bad results there is the danger that they will fall apart and the pressure becomes too great. So it's important that they have a good game […] a defeat by a big margin would be poisonous for the team."
However, past experience has shown that German teams do get a boost from a home crowd. The last time Germany hosted the tournament, in 2001, they managed to advance to the quarterfinals, before being eliminated by Finland. Nobody in the German camp is talking about the quarterfinals at this point, but coach Krupp has said that their minimum goal is to get past the first round.
Fine tuning
Leading up to the tournament, Germany has played six exhibition games, winning just two. Part of the problem is an age-old problem for Germany: a major lack of goal production. There was no sign that this problem had been solved in the exhibition games.
That's one reason many German hockey fans were shocked when Coach Krupp announced on Wednesday that he had cut Thomas Greilinger from the team, as he worked to get his roster down to the required 23 man-squad. While Greilinger was the top scorer in Germany's top professional league, the DEL, this past season, he had not been finding the back of the net in Germany's exhibition games.
Another problem for Germany is the fact that only two NHL players are available for the world championship. That includes center man Marcel Goc of the Nashville Predators. The 26-year-old is just hitting his prime and has been named Germany's captain.
Thorsten Weiss of the Eishockey News says coach Krupp wasn't putting his hopes in a big German contingent from the NHL in the first place, but he concedes that Krupp may have been secretly hoping that the Vancouver Canucks would make an early exit from the Stanley Cup playoffs. That would have freed up Christian Erhhoff on defense, and Marco Sturm or Jochen Hecht on offense.
However, every head coach at the world championship has been at the mercy of the NHL playoffs and injuries as they try to cobble together a winning team. Germany's opponents on Friday, the United States, bear no resemblance to the team that won the silver medal in Vancouver. And the fact that Ryan Miller, considered by many to be the world's best goaltender, won't be there, should work in Germany's favor when they take to the ice in front of 76,152 screaming fans in Gelsenkirchen.
Author: Chuck Penfold
Editor: Rob Turner