Living in the great frozen north of Canada, makes it difficult not to be a fan of the good old hockey game. I would imagine hockey plays the same role for people living in another sub zero country called Russia.
Last night’s Canada-Russia semi-final game didn’t disappoint any hockey fans around the world.
The photo above demonstrates how Russian goaltender Vadim Zhelobnyuk and the whole Russian sqaud felt with 5.4 seconds left in the 2009 IIHF World Juniors Championship Canada-Russia semi-final.
Canada and Russia have always shared a very strong rivalry on the international hockey scene even when Russia was still part of the Soviet Union.
One just has to look back at the 1972 Canada-Soviet hockey series and how bitter the rivalry was in that series, a movie based on that series was made in 2006 for CBC.
Russia leads the IIHF World Junior Hockey Championship since its inception in 1977 with 26 medals and Canada is a close second with 24 medals. Canada and Russia are the top countries in world junior hockey the next team behind these two teams is Finland with 12 medals.
With the rivalry and storied history between the Canadian and Russian junior teams, clearly Saturday Night’s semi-final game was the hot ticket. Especially considering Canada knocked Russia out of the finals in 2008 and beat them in the finals from 2005-2007.
The scoring started early two minutes into the first, as Brett Sonne put in his first of the tournament. However, in what ended up characterizing the game for the rest of the night, Maxim Goncharov of Russia scored three minutes after Sonne to tie the game 1-1.
Patrice Cormier put Canada back on top seven minutes in to the first period 2-1 only to have Dmitry Klopov score 16 seconds later. The first period finished 2-2.
The first period was high paced and finished pretty even with Canada having 11 shots on goal to Russia’s 12. Canada was more disciplined in the first period with two penalty minutes to six minutes for Russia.
The second period was rather one sided with Canada out shooting Russia 13-3 and Russia spending close to half the period on the penalty kill.
Despite Canada’s excellent power play through out the 2009 campaign, Russia managed to hold Canada to one goal in the second period due to great play in nets by Russia’s Vadim Zhelobnyuk and good defense.
The score at the end of the second period, 3-2 for Canada, which brings us to the action packed third period.
The third period started with a bang after Evgeny Grachev scored a minute into the period tieing the game once again at 3-3.
Shorthanded five minutes in, the ever so skilled forward Angelo Esposito showed why he was not a player to be passed on for team Canada. Canada gained the lead once again making it 4-3.
Not to be outdone, with the two man advantage, the persistent Ruskies came back less than a minute later on a Sergei Andronov powerplay goal, 4-4.
Now the story of the game took a turn, with two minutes and 20 seconds left Russia gained the lead for the first time in the game off of Klopov’s second, making the score 5-4.
Canada did not look as sharp as Russia in the third period and being down 5-4 with just over two minutes left, fans of Canada’s team were abandoning hope for a fifth straight gold medal.
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