Round 18: Třinec – Mladá Boleslav
The Třinec hockey players took their seventh defeat out of the last ten games hard and closed themselves in a cabin for forty-five minutes. “We don’t want to be where we are now and we needed to say something about it,” goalkeeper Ondřej Kacetl, who was the first to leave the Třinec dressing room, indicated the content of the long discussion.
“Some games we don’t work very well as a team. Various articles are falling out of our game, we can’t keep the lead, so we needed to say something about it before the break, so that we know what to work on and polish our performances so that our machine works well again. Because now it’s quite rough,” described Kacetl.
The key moment of the match came at 2:1 for the home team in the middle of the third period, when Sikora hit Dvořáček in the head in an attempt to stop his opponent. And the referee, after watching the video, decided on a higher penalty. “It was a fight and from what I saw on the dice, Siki knew someone was going to try to attack him and he basically went all out in the fight unlike the other player. I don’t know if it was a foul for five minutes at all,” said Třinec captain Petr Vrána.
“But the referees judged it that way, and we can scold the young lad for it, but it probably wouldn’t do any good. He’s young, a lot of those things will happen in his career. I’ve done stupid things too. They have to learn from it, think about it. Siky is, I think, intelligent enough to evaluate it and know how to react to it and what to take away from it,” mused Vrána.
The experienced striker, decorated with extra league medals, looked elsewhere for reasons for another defeat. “It’s tempting to say we lost the game because of that moment, but getting sent off is part of hockey and we’re there to prevent that. Instead we got two goals. We know the situation we are in, unfortunately we do things we don’t want to and shouldn’t do. And it costs us matches,” pointed out the captain from Třinec.
He too had his say in the cabin. “We had to talk about some things. We need to eliminate mistakes, not to score goals that we don’t need, and to improve our performance in such a way that we can manage several games in a row and have something to bounce back from. It’s important for us to win and it doesn’t matter if we score six goals or one goal. We have to help ourselves, no one will do it for us,” emphasized Vrána.