Extraliga will once again experience a battle where there is no room for improvement and which will send one team to the quarterfinals and end the season of the other.
“We will go to Liberec with a clear goal, we want to win the match and advance. I believe we have the strength for it,” says Pilsen striker Jakub Pour, who delayed the end of the season with the winning goal in the fourth part of a tense series and set up Tuesday’s decisive match.
In the last twenty years, Pilsen experienced 10 such duels, Liberec 8. And the West Bohemians have an excellent record in them. Of the last ten series that reached the fifth game in the case of the preliminary round or the seventh in the playoffs, they won eight of them!
They only failed last year in the preliminary round against Mlada Boleslaví and in the semi-finals four years ago, when they fell 1:5 in Třinec. And what concerns only the seventh games, they have an excellent success rate of 85.71 percent in them, and their substitute boss Martin Straka scored a league-record ten Canadian points for two goals and eight assists.
The White Tigers have failed to win the key game of the series three times in their history. Five years ago in the quarter-finals with Hradec Králové, and with the same opponent three years earlier in the semi-finals. However, they have triumphed five times and their advantage may be that most of the players of the current squad have experienced the last two successes. A year ago, the White Beasts defeated Kometa Brno 6:1 in the fifth preliminary round, and the year before that they split the seventh semi-final duel with Sparta on their ice 2:1.
“Just from last year, we have the experience to handle it. I believe that we will finish it successfully at home. We know what we have to play and what to expect from them,” Liberec forward Jan Šír said for the club’s website. Who will be happy this time? The match starts at 7 p.m. and if it is not decided within sixty minutes, extra time will be played until the decision is made.