Young Stars/Tigers Get Lucky!
In their first meeting of the 2011 – 2012 season the U15 Stars/Tigers need some good goaltending from Sämi Prosenz to sneak out a win against a hard working Vienna Capitals team.
Right from the start the Young Stars looked very disorganized and were visibly nervous missing passes and only getting four shots on net against a Caps team that was ready and willing to compete.
The Caps got their first goal on some careless play by the Stars who were promptly penalized. The period ended 0 – 1 but it could have been much worse as the Stars only managed four shots on goal and where more than happy to go to the locker room to regroup.
The Stars were finally rewarded for their better effort in the beginning of the second period when Emil Sztatecsny put a hard short side shot past the caps goalie to give his team some much needed lift. Just when things were starting to look better for the Stars the puck slipped under a sprawled Stars goalie and found the net to give the lead back to the Caps once more. With the Stars on the power play Florian Baltram worked his way into the slot on a nice individual effort and beat the Caps goalie high to the glove side to equalize. When Tommy Zitz scored late in the period from Hugo Jansons and Sebastian Habernig the Stars seemed to get their second wind and looked like themselves again.
The third period started well for the Stars but they still had trouble in their own end, which lead to some dangerous opportunities for the Caps. Hugo Jansons finally gave his team some insurance when he scored (4 – 2) off a broken play from Zitz and the Stars should have closed the door but couldn’t sustain the offensive pressure they needed. The Caps who never gave up in this game got a timely goal when one of their forwards walked through three Stars players and made no mistake closing the gap to 4 – 3. Pulling their goalie for the extra attacker the Caps threw everything they had at the Stars net but the Stars goalie held them off to preserve the victory.
Coach’s Comments:
It was not our best effort but we managed to get the win. We made a ton of mental mistakes and our passing was terrible on this day but to their credit the team fought through it and hopefully gained some early lessons on how to approach the game. It looked like we thought we could just show up and get the points but as we all know now you still have to play the game to win. Every part of our game needs to improve and we need to much more aggressive on the offense if we want to score goals. We need to remember that a lot of good individual players do not make a team. They have to play together, which is what we did not do today. We got good goal tending and had some good individual efforts but overall we did not play well. Tomorrow against Graz both Coach Wehrhan and I expect a much better effort.
