Tuesday’s games

HIFK - SaiPa	5-4	60min
Ilves - HPK	4-3	60min
JYP - Jokerit	6-4	60min
Kärpät - Ässät	6-2	60min
Lukko - Tappara	2-4	60min
Pelicans - Blues	2-3	60min
TPS - KalPa	4-3	60min

I won’t post a table, it hasn’t changed much. A good win for Jyp cemented their 6th place, and HIFK huffed and puffed their way past SaiPa.  Highlights are in the usual place, with the Jyp film strangely lacking goal celebration noise.

HIFK-Jokerit fighting special

There was a bit of a barney in the HIFK-Jokerit game today. It was the last derby of the season so I suppose they wanted to take their final chance to punch their neighbour’s lights out. Jokerit’s Sami Helenius and HIFK’s new Czech defenceman Libor Ustrnul were the guilty parties. You can see highlights at Nelonen’s site.

Results:

HPK - Tappara	1-2	62min
Jokerit - HIFK	5-2	60min
Kärpät - JYP	4-1	60min
SaiPa - Blues	6-2	60min
Ässät - Pelicans	3-5	60min

And table:

1.	Kärpät	42	90
2.	Jokerit	44	87
3.	Pelicans	45	83
4.	Blues	42	79
5.	Tappara	43	76
6.	JYP	43	71
7.	HIFK	43	68
8.	Ilves	42	68
9.	Lukko	43	60
10.	TPS	44	58
11.	SaiPa	43	51
12.	HPK	45	46
13.	KalPa	43	38
14.	Ässät	44	34

Ice in Tampere

Further to my previous hand wringing about the weather, I had a look at some outdoor hockey locations today. After a visit to the Hockey Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago, I was intrigued first and foremost by the origins of the sport in Tampere. I have been there before, and been amused by the Finnish obsession with beating Sweden in 1995 and envious of the children who could spend all their time on the slapshot game without embarrassment, but this time was different.

I was the only visitor there surrounded by (far too many) guides, so the slapshot thing was out. I am too crap at it. The Globen exhibits are funny and always will be, but I’ve seen them before. Note to foreigners who might not expect it: Finns don’t do open top buses, they celebrate in cabriolets. I did have a crafty listen to ‘den glider in‘, though.

For those who don’t know, this was the song released by the Swedish national team and Nick Borgen before the championships. The title and chorus is a line of commentary from the 1969 World Championships, which Sweden won. As the winning goal went in, the commentator screamed ‘it’s gliding in!’, a line that might possibly have as much significance for Swedes as Kenneth Wolstenholm’s commentary on the 1966 World Cup final does for my compatriots.

The lyrics are a little bit premature, to put it mildly. ‘We have done it before, we will do it again, beating them all one by one’, the song begins. So when Finland won their first ever World Championship - under a Swedish coach, Curt Lindström, and in Stockholm to boot - they immediately adopted the song as their own anthem. For some reason Finnish people speaking Swedish sound incredibly sarcastic to me, an effect not wholly avoided by those whose first language is Swedish.

The celebrations took place in Sergels Torg, the square that had been reserved for the Swedish squad to parade their trophy, with 20,000 Finns going mental instead. When they got back they had huge parties - using the aforementioned cabriolets as transport - in the market squares of Helsinki, Tampere and Turku. And of course they released their own version of the song….

Anyway, I digress. The first part of the Finnish HHOF is the section with all the old equipment used by players in the good old days, and a few pictures of the first games in Tampere. The equipment looks flimsy, to be honest, and it makes you wonder just how hard people must have been in those days. The pictures show the first hockey games in Tampere, which took place on the ice at Lake Pyhäjärvi. Today I went to have a look at the ice there, to see if it would support a game now, and the unsurprising answer is that no, it would not:

This lake only froze this week and after 20 or so hours of temperatures above zero, it wasn’t in a good state. I also had a look at the artificial ice at Pyynikki, which was the main stadium for Tappara/TBK and Ilves before Hakametsä was built. Pyynikki is something of a haven for sport in Tampere, as well as having beautiful beaches, forests, a viewing tower with an excellent cafe, and some very expensive residential property. The athletics track there used to be the home of Tampere football, and the Tampere tennis tournament takes place near Hotel Rosendahl every year too.

Here is the hockey stadium in the days when it was used more regularly:

This period (from 1940-1960) was a golden age for hockey in Tampere, with clubs from the city winning 13 out of 20 championships. Curiously, given this relative dominance, only in 1958, 1959 and 1960 did two Tampere sides contest the final. The kits were a LOT better in those pre-advertising days:

Pentti Toivonen (TK-V), Erkki Koiso (Ilves) and Yrjö Hakala (Tappara) pose for a picture in 1960

Here’s Pyynikki stadium today:

No real point to these pictures, I just thought you might appreciate before and after shots taken from my lovely winter walk. And I did want to reassure Ursus Arctos that artificial ice is still in use and not in significant danger, despite what HBL might have to say about it.

As for the future, who knows? Hopefully it won’t be as bad as people fear, and this winter will prove to be some kind of horrific one-off. While I don’t play hockey, I really will be annoyed if sunny, crisp days like today become rarer with this climate change business.

HIFK win storming derby

Sometimes TV schedulers make really dumb decisions, and tonight was one of those times. Canal+ decided that they would show Pelicans vs Blues, a showcase of the also-rans of SM Liiga, and left the HIFK-Jokerit game well alone. As Pelicans cruised to a 2-1 win over Espoo’s not-so-finest, HIFK made an amazing 3rd period comeback to go into a 4-2 lead before Jokerit tied the game with a short-handed equaliser on 59.08 minutes.

Elsewhere, Ässät went into a 2-0 lead before remembering how rubbish they are and losing 4-2 at TPS, and KalPa lost 5-2 to Kärpät.

1.	Kärpät	41	87
2.	Jokerit	43	84
3.	Pelicans	44	80
4.	Blues	41	79
5.	Tappara	42	74
6.	JYP	42	71
7.	HIFK	42	68
8.	Ilves	42	68
9.	TPS	43	58
10.	Lukko	42	57
11.	SaiPa	42	48
12.	HPK	44	45
13.	KalPa	43	38
14.	Ässät	43	34

I can only find highlights of Pelicans-Blues and KalPa-Kärpät. I’d like to see the Helsinki derby goals again, especially the disallowed Jokerit goal in the 1st period, so if anyone knows where to find them please post the link in the comments section…

EDIT: Thanks to Bill, we can now offer a link to Nelonen’s highlights from the Helsinki derby.

Nil nil nil

Not a single away goal in SM-Liiga tonight, with convincing wins for Tappara, Jokerit and Blues against Ilves, Lukko and SaiPa respectively. The standout game was the derby at Hakametsä, with a 3-0 win cementing Tappara’s place in the top 6. Here’s the table:

1.	Kärpät	40	84
2.	Jokerit	42	83
3.	Blues	40	79
4.	Pelicans	43	77
5.	Tappara	42	74
6.	JYP	42	71
7.	Ilves	42	68
8.	HIFK	41	66
9.	Lukko	42	57
10.	TPS	42	55
11.	SaiPa	42	48
12.	HPK	44	45
13.	KalPa	42	38
14.	Ässät	42	34

And highlights from Hakametsä.

What will global warming do to hockey?

There was a story in yesterday’s paper about the poor winter we’re having, and how it is affecting the ski-ing trails and municipal ice rinks that are usually available at this time of year. When the temperature is above freezing point, it costs a hell of a lot of money to keep ice rinks in decent shape, and some municipalities are deciding that that isn’t a good investment right now.

Oulunkyla ice park (the realm of M-15) is currently costing €600 a day in electricity bills, thanks to the warm weather. The total cost to Helsinki council’s recreation department is running at €2,500 a day, which of course must be set against the savings they are making from not having to clear snow and spread gravel on the roads. Sari Hartonen, from Finland’s Meterological Institute, was not impressed with the use of coal-produced electricity.

‘It’s not especially smart to freeze ice rinks, ice halls and ski tunnels now, when it’s so warm,’ she told Hufvudstadsbladet.

Positive feedback loops and climate change aside, do Finnish kids have the commitment to keep playing hockey when it becomes difficult for them to do so? Do city councils want to keep the facilities and infrastructure in place when it costs so much more money and becomes that bit more environmentally unfriendly? I used to play football on grass in this kind of weather. You get very muddy, but it’s a lot of fun and you don’t need much equipment.

————-

There were a lot of goals in SM Liiga yesterday. In Nelonen’s televised game of the month, Ässät lost their local derby but only on a penalty shoot-out. Kärpät won a thriller at TPS, HIFK got an overtime victory over Tappara, and SaiPa surprisingly beat Pelicans. Results and table (JA means extra time):

HIFK - Tappara 5-4 JA

Ilves - HPK 6-4

JYP - KalPa 4-0

SaiPa - Pelicans 5-4

TPS - Kärpät 4-5 JA

Ässät - Lukko 2-3 JA

1.	Kärpät	40	84
2.	Jokerit	41	80
3.	Pelicans	43	77
4.	Blues	39	76
5.	Tappara	41	71
6.	JYP	42	71
7.	Ilves	41	68
8.	HIFK	41	66
9.	Lukko	41	57
10.	TPS	42	55
11.	SaiPa	41	48
12.	HPK	44	45
13.	KalPa	42	38
14.	Ässät	42	34

Here are highlights of the Ilves game.