In the 44th minute, he scored to make it 2:1. With his teammates, he now leads 3:1 in the series. On Sunday, the East Bohemians will strive to avoid having to travel to the north. “I’m mostly happy that we won and scored another point,” noted Matěj Chalupa, who started in the elite formation with Cingel and Lv. “It’s great that he jumped in and helped the team to victory,” Mountfield coach Tomáš praised Chalupa’s move Martinec.
He scored an assist on Lalancette’s goal in the first minute. “I confess that I have not even seen him. I threw the puck to his side and went to substitute. I sat down and it was 1:0,” smiled Chalupa, who came to eastern Bohemia from Litvínov in January.
“Matej Chalupa is a good player. He kicked his career to the heights in Hradec and actually got overseas from us. But I’m glad he’s back with us. He has been playing well and doing well since he came. It is productive. We now have a roster of twenty-five players, and every single one of them deserves to play in the playoffs,” said Martinec with satisfaction.
So far, his team is handling the quarter-finals with the White Tigers brilliantly. In the entire series, they lost only 97 seconds when they let the opponent take the lead at the end of the first race. Since then, the East Bohemians have dominated the ice.
“Every single player is doing a great job, the guys are playing as a team and now they left everything on the ice again. But in the end, we always start to worry about the result. We’re going to make some stupid foul. Liberec has an experienced team, a good team and so far they are punishing us for this. The boys know that they have to play to the best of their abilities in order to beat Liberec,” said Martinec. Unlike on Thursday, the guests defended themselves against the home team’s final power play.
“However, their pressure was very high at the end. Fortunately, we managed it, Machy (Machovský) caught excellently just like on Thursday. A big thank you goes to him,” said Chalupa to the support team, which conceded only two goals in two duels under Ještěd.
“We mainly played well in the back five and in the forward five. We played responsibly. “We had a minor setback, but they took care of it,” stated the Hradec hero. Mountfield’s hockey players feel that they have more energy in the series. “They have already played in the preliminary round, they had difficult matches with Pilsen. As we play a lot of skating hockey, they can run out of energy. However, we must not look at that, we must focus on ourselves and grab it on Sunday,” concluded Chalupa.