It can be argued that no team was in worse shape after seven periods of Champions Hockey League action than SC Bern, who got hammered 7-0 by Ocelari Trinec and then fell behind against Tappara Tampere. However, they came back to win in Tampere, and now look to be in decent shape as they get ready to face the same two teams on home ice.
by Daniel Jezek and Leo Runsas
After two rounds Group E is one of the tightest in the Champions Hockey League, as all four teams have three points. For SC Bern, it's a fortunate position to be in after a terrible start. They lost their first game in Trinec 7-0 and then fell behind 2-0 in Tampere. They recovered, however, and scored four consecutive goals en route to a 5-3 win to even their record. As both of those games were on the road, they will play their third and fourth games against the same two teams on home ice and hope to take the group lead by the end of round four.
Head coach Guy Boucher had to explain what went wrong after the debacle in Trinec.
"They came out really strong, they had a lot of pressure in our zone and we had trouble playing in first seven to 10 minutes. We had really bad penalty killing, after that we were just playing a catch-up hockey. We didn't play it well, they were transitioning very fast." Asked if he was surpised by being on the wrong side of a lop-sided score he answered, "I am surprised by seven (goals against) and by how we showed up. But I'm not surprised that Trinec is a good team. We knew it. We need to be better in next games, that's for sure."
In Tappara, he re-iterated his thoughts on the Trinec game. "Our last game was horrible. Nothing was working and we were falling everywhere. That was a really good team we played down there but we were horrible. Last game was certainly not what we wanted and we want to bounce back."
Even though Bern's second game was only two days later, they were able to make a game plan for the game against Tappara game and, according to Boucher, it really had an effect on the game.
"Everybody recognised that it wasn’t us and we didn’t want to come back from the trip with two similar games. We knew that this is a very good team, we scouted them and we planned very thoroughly to play specifically against them. The work paid off and the players really paid the price and showed character."
But it didn't start out that way. Tappara scored the lone goal of an evenly-played first period and fell behind by two goals when Tappara clicked on the power play early in the second. They had now been out-scored 9-0 after 82 minutes of hockey.
"For me the biggest thing for us was the mental toughness that we needed to show after 2-0 to the opponent," Boucher said. "It could have been discouraging. Our players were terrific, they kept the focus, we reloaded mentally and emotionally and we came out strong and grinded it out one goal at a time. To me it shows that in the future we can come over lots of adversity."
Indeed, three minutes after the 2-0 goal, Bud Holloway scored a power-play goal for Bern's first goal in the CHL. That was followed by three more power-play goals in the second period, including two in the last two minutes, and Bern suddenly led 4-2 after two periods. Holloway had four points and Ryan Gardner three. The game ended 5-3.
"For us it was a character game. We wanted to show character and I think we did that because we were trailing by two goals and we had lots of penalties in the first period. We came back and battled hard."
In the break between their third and fourth CHL games, Bern played a pair of exhibition games against Swiss clubs, falling 6-5 to Davos before beating the Kloten Flyers 4-2. They are now set to resume their Group E schedule in the friendly confines of Post Finance Arena, where they will try to exact revenge on Ocelari Trinec on Thursday and win for a second straight time against Tappara on Saturday.