“For us, Boleslav was a very unwanted opponent, we went against it with great respect. It was important for Sunday’s game that we scored two goals quickly and pushed the home team to the wall mentally. The series was also broken by the excellent Furch, and the power plays also helped a lot,” explained the coach of the winners, Patrik Martinec.
Mladá Boleslav will be missing from the elite eight after five years. “We paid for a miserable end, but there were chances. The unfavorable start to the fourth game split us up, unfortunately I contributed to this with the opening foul, which Kometa quickly punished,” forward David Šťastný admitted. “We said to ourselves that we did not want to return the series to Brno at any cost, we had more determination in us. They didn’t we are no longer unnecessary fouls or mistakes. We soon led 2:0, then things went according to our rules,” indicated striker Petr Holík.
The Central Bohemian club failed to force a decisive fifth meeting. “The beginning of the match affected the entire course of it, because we allowed ourselves to be eliminated in the first minute and conceded from Brno’s power play. When against such a quality team as Kometa has, you pull the short end from the start, it is very difficult to turn things around,” thought home coach Jiří Kalous .
Although Mladá Boleslav beat Kometa four times in the regular season, they were never able to score more than two goals in the playoffs. “The preliminary round was a picture of the whole season, when an otherwise hard-working team struggled in the end,” said the coach. All home goals for Boleslav in the preliminary round were scored by Finnish defender Alex Lintuniemi. “On Saturday, we were all heroes with maximum fighting spirit and I only scored two goals. A day later, my next lucky shot didn’t really have any value,” he said.