Switzerland was on the hunt for their first win when they came up against the tournament’s surprise darlings, Belarus.
Both teams fell victim to sloppy play in the opening period with missed passes, turnovers and penalties. The Swiss let a 5-on-3 chance get away from them, but a few minutes later, they forced the puck away from Belarus in the defensive zone and skated down the ice.
Noah Fuss took the initial shot and Denys Rubanik was there to poke the rebound past Alexei Kolosov. Less than a minute later, Lionel Marchard’s shot from the slot trickled through five-hole and that was it for Kolosov in the Belarusian crease.
“It was a second effort goal,” Rubanik explained. “I had to go on the change actually, but I went for the rush instead. I just took the rebound and scored.”
With Rostislav Zinovenko now minding the net, head coach Yevgeni Yesaulov was hoping it would be a wake up call for his team. The Swiss had other ideas.
After a missed wrap-around, there was a scramble in the slot, and Joel Salzgeber was able to widen Switzerland’s lead to 3-0 before the end of the first.
Yesaulov must have given a rousing speech in the room as his team started the new period with a bang. After cycling the puck low, a big shot from the point from captain Vladislav Kolyachonok was tipped by Vitali Pinchuk to bring Belarus within two goals of tying the game.
“We asked ourselves what are we doing?” Ilya Usov explained. “We weren’t playing the way we were supposed to play. Our parents back home are watching and we just kind of picked it up and played for the country in the second period.”
Before the end of the frame, Yevgeni Oxentyuk cut the Swiss lead to 3-2 after sending the puck high glove side from the slot.
Belarus continued to push hard for the tying goal in the third, pressing in the Swiss zone, and coming up with big stops from Zinovenko in their own.
Sergei Kuznetsov was credited with the tying goal, but it was an own-goal off the stick of Swiss defender Bastian Guggenheim. Shortly after, Alexander Palchik buried a rebound off the pad of Florian Vuichard to give Belarus the go-ahead goal.
After giving up the 3-0 lead, the Swiss players knew that they had to focus on continuing to play their game. “We had to keep moving our feet, we were playing our hockey,” said Rubanik. “We’ve trained a lot this month, and we just kept doing the right things, putting the puck in the net. We have to make sure we play that way for a full 60 minutes.”
Switzerland responded as Fuss tied the game less than two minutes after giving Belarus the lead.
Belarus continued to pepper the Swiss net, coming dangerously close to re-taking the lead many times. The game would go to a 4-on-4 overtime period, where Swiss captain Simon Knak went on a break with Jannik Canova. Knak took the initial shot, and Canova was there to send the rebound into the net. The goal came with only 18 seconds left in overtime.
“It’s good for us that we didn’t go to a shootout because now, tomorrow, we just have to get one point to continue on in the tournament, so we’re all happy [about that],” Rubanik said.
Switzerland will face-off against Finland tomorrow in their final game of the preliminary round. For Belarus, they now prepare for the quarter-finals.
“You’ve got to start in the first minute of the first period. You can see that we gave up the first three goals and then it just wasn’t enough time to fully comeback,” Usov said. “It was pretty good [to beat the Czechs and Finns] but now we’ve had two losses in a row, so we’ve just got to shift our focus to the quarter finals and play our best game there.”
