Norway rolls to win over Germany and seventh-place finish at Para Hockey Worlds

When the World Para Hockey Championship began just under a week ago, the seventh-eighth place game was the one contest no one wanted to be a part of.

Not only would playing in the game mean you finished in the bottom two of the tournament, it also meant you’d be relegated to the B Pool for the 2024 World Championship.

Such was the case for Team Norway and Team Germany on Saturday morning at the Moose Jaw Events Centre, with Norway coming away with a 6-1 victory to finish in seventh place.

“I think with our team, we have a lot of young players who played in key situations, and now they know what its like to get up to the A Pool,” said Norway coach Ken Babey. “I’m really proud of our team’s effort, they played hard for each other and executed the gameplan almost to a tee and didn’t give Germany a lot to work with. It was a good learning curve for our team this whole tournament and I think you’ll see in the Paralympics very soon.”

The contest was a rematch from Day 1 of the tournament, where Germany took a 5-3 victory. As a result, Norway was looking for a measure of revenge on top of picking up their first win.

“I felt the first game we had a lot of puck control and we didn’t execute the game plan all the way through, and that led to some bad goals against,” Norway captain Knut Andre Nordstoga said. “So it felt good today to show how we can play, get the win and finish off the tournament with a win. It was really important for us.”

Norway wasted no time getting things going, with Ola Oiseth and Audun Bakke scoring in the first period for a 2-0 lead through 15 minutes. Oiseth then finished off his hat trick with a pair of second period goals before Alexander Lyngroth and Loyd Remi Solberg added further insurance markers in the third.

Lucas Sklorz scored Germany’s lone goal in the second period.

Germany coach Andreas Pokorny was disappointed in the result, especially given how they’d had some solid showings in the preliminary round.

“We wanted to end this tournament well because we had three really good games, but today we weren’t ready” Pokorny said. “They were better skaters and checkers and it was just a hard one today… we talked before that Norway wanted to win this game, but we wanted to end it good, too, and we just didn’t have anything. We know we’re close with Norway and they were just better than us today.”

Andreas Sundt turned aside seven shots to earn the win while Simon Kunst was far busier at the other end of the ice with 21 stops.

With their tournament coming to an end, both teams were thankful for the experience of playing in Moose Jaw, even if they didn’t get the result they wanted.

“It was a very good tournament from the beginning to the end, it was great to be here, to play here and to experience the whole atmosphere,” said Sklorz. “It was great organization and a great tournament and we’d like to come back, hopefully in the A Pool.”

Pokorny was of much the same opinion,

“We enjoyed it here, it was very good organization, it was a good place,” he said. “It’s not Calgary or Toronto, but it’s a nice city and everything was perfectly organized. It made for some really good hockey games and we want to the thank Moose Jaw, we enjoyed it.”

Babey hails from Saskatoon, and expressed pride in his home province for the success in pulling a large event of in such a short period of time.

“I’m very proud being from Saskatchewan and seeing the great job the Moose Jaw organizing committee did,” he said. “They did a great job, there wasn’t anything they missed, everything went amazingly well. I’m very proud that we were here and everybody treated us so well.”

The tournament continues Saturday afternoon with the semifinal games. China takes on the U.S. at 3 p.m., followed by Canada and Czechia at 7 p.m.