There have been a lot of problems against the Fischtown Pinguins from Bremerhaven for some time now. In the last season of the German Ice Hockey League (DEL), they surprisingly won the main round and only had to admit defeat to the Eisbären Berlin in the final of the playoffs. This season they are again in the top 3 of the table. What you should definitely avoid against the North Germans is taking a seat in the penalty box too often. In a team that has been working well together for many years, the power play is the most well-rehearsed of all the Penguins elements. The Augsburg Panthers did exactly that on Sunday afternoon, they were outnumbered three times in the middle third in Bremerhaven, and twice the Augsburg players were allowed back on the ice before the end of their two-minute penalty – because the Penguins’ power play had struck in each case. The outnumbered games “probably broke our necks,” said Panther striker Florian Elias after his team’s 4-1 defeat.
On Friday, the Augsburg team at least ensured that the weekend finally brought something pleasant with it. The past Panther days were turbulent anyway. The club parted ways with coach Ted Dent on Wednesday after the team suffered its tenth defeat in a row the day before, a 3-4 loss at the Frankfurter Löwen. Instead of Dent, Larry Mitchell, the Augsburg sports director who had installed Dent this season, stood behind the gang. “Ten games is a fifth of the season,” said Mitchell when explaining Dent’s dismissal. For him, things came full circle on Friday in the home derby against the Straubing Tigers: almost exactly ten years after he was dismissed as coach by Augsburg he returned to the AEV team as interim coach.
And the effect that all sports clubs hope for when they change their coach occurred with the Panthers. After just one full training session, they defeated Straubinger, who had won all of their previous seven DEL away games, 4-1. The passion has returned, said Mitchell after the long-awaited victory. And he hoped his players would enjoy the feeling of what was possible “when you play with passion, fight and togetherness.”
Fittingly, it wasn’t the ice hockey artists who got the Panthers back on track, but someone who had been working primarily on ice hockey for years. Alexander Oblinger, native of Augsburg, 35 years old, weighs 96 kilograms. The striker, who celebrated his 700th DEL game last season, was only lightly shot by his teammate Florian Elias in the 23rd minute, but his energetic celebration when the target crossed the goal line left no doubt that he was the shooter this particular one was 1-0.
Especially since the Panthers weren’t even in the lead in their ten defeats in a row. To reinforce this feeling, which is no longer familiar, Oblinger also made it 2-0 – in typical Oblinger style: he placed his body, which was difficult to displace, directly in front of Straubing’s goalkeeper Florian Bugl, which he beat as if in a face-to-face duel as far as possible with the helmets. He could hardly notice how the disc first hit his skate and from there into the goal (31st).
According to Mitchell, a “dry spell that no one wants to go through” has ended
Oblinger’s fifth and sixth goals of the season ensured that the Panthers won all five games in which he scored, as two more Augsburg goals in the final third secured the victory, which, according to Mitchell, ended a “dry spell that no one wants to go through.” . In Bremerhaven, Oblinger was hardly able to put himself in the spotlight; the DEL’s best defense by far only allowed Florian Elias to make it 1-1 (26′). Now not only coach Larry Mitchell has several days to prepare for the next game against the Nuremberg Ice Tigers next Friday. But also the sports director Larry Mitchell to find a successor for the interim coach Larry Mitchell.
