Flyers rally to win 196th derby against the ZSC Lions

Zurich was comfortably seated in second place while Kloten was just one point within the play-off spots. Both teams had lost their previous game but it was Kloten that had the pressure before this game.

The Flyers started with a hooking penalty against their own Finnish forward Tommi Santala but the Lions had a hard time creating chances in the starting minutes. But when Robert Nilsson got a chance to score from in between the face-off circles he took the shoot and beat Martin Gerber and put the Lions on the scoreboard a first time. Half the period was over when Lions captain Seger was benched for interference. Swedish defenseman Erik Gustafsson passed the puck to newly acquired James Sheppard who deked his way through the Lions defense and netted the first goal for the Flyers in this game. The intensity in this game was rather on the light side with a slight advantage for the Lions and in the 15th minute Roman Wick who had missed a big chunk of the first part of the season scored the second goal of the evening.

There's a German saying in sports that if you don't score on the chances you'll receive the goals. Eight minutes were played in the second period and the Flyers had missed the chance to even the score on a powerplay but instead kept on pushing but Niklas Schlegel in goal for the Lions had an answer for each shot that came his direction. It seemed just a question of seconds or minutes until Kloten would score but instead, Kris Foucault scored the third goal out of nowhere and silenced the crowd that had slowly woken up. But the Flyers were not prepared to give up lightly and less than 20 seconds later Schlegel had to pick the puck from behind the red line when Tommi Santala beat him between the pads. This gave the home team some speed and with 3 minutes left Denis Hollenstein took an attempt to circle around the goal but saw Guggisberg in the far right corner by himself, passed and his team mate only needed to net the puck from a rather tight angle. And to finish off the high scoring second period, Tommi Santala beat Schlegel with a far shot just 2 minutes later and gave his team the first lead of the game.

Starting the period with a boxplay can be tricky but in this case, the Flyers kept their crease free of any dangerous shots and kept on that one goal lead. During the next minutes Kloten made a better impression and seemed more determined to shut down the Lions for good by blocking shots and trying to create chances but even with a man-adavantage for two minutes the home team couldn't be sure about the thin lead. With the beginning of the final two minutes coach Crawford replaced his goalie for a 6th attacker, giving the forwards a last chance to score the equalizer. A time-out was taken by the Lions coach but tonight the home team succeeded for the first time this season in a derby.

Towards the second period the game picked up some speed and emotion which kept both teams going to the end of the game even if no goals were scored in the final period. Kloten fought for the pucks and surely deserved the win. What definitely needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that the Lions organisation was missing 8 players for this game which made the set-up for Marc Crawford even more difficult.

Tweets by @eurohockey