Team Canada have trailed for all of 89 seconds at the World Cup of Hockey.
Indeed, Canada have advanced to the semi-finals without much resistance. They rolled over the Europeans 4-1 on Wednesday night, concluding an efficient preliminary round that saw them outscore the opposition 14-3. A single-elimination semi-final lies ahead of them tomorrow.
Jonathan Toews scored twice and added an assist, but he does not think Canada have found their best just yet.
Photo: Kevin Sousa, USA TODAY
“We’ve shown it in moments, where we hem teams in their zone [and] they can’t get out,” Toews said. “If they do have the puck we have two guys all over it and we’re turning it over and we’re throwing it back their way. We want that pressure, four lines going all the time.”
Canada won Group A and next face North America or Russia in the first semi-final tomorrow night, with Russia getting the spot with a win yesterday in the preliminary round finale against Finland. Europe play Group A winner Sweden in the semi-finals.
“I didn’t think either team probably had the emotion they’ve had,” Canadian coach Mike Babcock said. “Both teams knew they had advanced. You know, as much as I think our guys really tried to get the emotional level at a high level, we were casual with the puck. We made mistakes we don’t normally make, and saying that, we had the puck a lot, could have scored lots of goals. And their goalie was good.”
Sidney Crosby and Logan Couture also scored, and Corey Crawford made 19 saves in his World Cup debut.
“That was pretty special, I’ve waited a long time,” he said. “Watching as a kid, watching Olympics, watching world juniors. It’s a pretty special feeling to put that jersey on. Having friends and family and my parents here, it was a great feeling.”
Crawford gave up the only goal when Marian Hossa — normally his teammate with the Chicago Blackhawks — knuckled a puck past him from a sharp angle in the second period.
“I don’t know what I was trying to do there,” Crawford said. “I’ll probably hear about that the rest of the year.”
Jaroslav Halak stopped 42 shots for Europe.
“I thought Canada did an amazing job of getting in the lanes and taking away any opportunities we had,” Europe coach Ralph Krueger said. “But there is a lot of growth in this game for us. We are where we wanted to be at this point. We are in the semi-final.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier