The 2010 champion continues to win

09 May 2011 | Henrik Lundqvist and David Schlegel

Czech Republic wins again. Tonight Germany had to surrender to last year’s World Champion.

The Czechs win the last game of the Qualification Round 5-2 against Germany to keep the perfect record. Tomas Plekanec scored two goals and Jaromir Jagr had three assists.

Tomas Plekanec: "I think we played well. We had a good second period, when we scored many goals and finished the game without problems."

Both teams were already qualified for the quarter finals but now also the opponents are known. Czech Republic will play USA while Germany gets Sweden.

"We did not have luck today in the deciding moments and did not use our chances", says the German coach Uwe Krupp. "It would be interesting to see, how the Czechs would react, if they would not score those goals in the 2nd period. But it did not work that way. Czechs showed their quality and scored goals".

Forward Daniel Kreutzer played his 200th game for the German national team: "Since the start we had to defence a lot and waited for our chances. The Czechs are the best team in this tournament so far".

Czech Republic took the lead in the first minute when Jagr assisted Plekanec for 1-0. Germany replied in the next minute when John Tripp tied the game on a rebound.

Michael Frolik took the Czechs back to the lead in the middle of the first period.

Rolinek and Frolik
Photo: Roman Kucera

The Czech played well in the second period in which they scored another three goals. 1-3 (Karel Rachunek) and 4-1 (Plekanec) were both power play goals. Patrik Elias scored 5-1 at 36:58.

"The goal for 5:1 took our chances away", says German Captain Michael Wolf. "We had a lot of chances in the 2nd period, but could not score. The Czechs had two chances and scored three goals. That was the difference."

The game lost pace in the third period when both teams played to save themselves for the playoffs. Germany out-shot Czech Republic 19-4 in the period and got the only goal when Thomas Greilinger scored 2-5 at 58:26.

Czechs outplayed their opponent and since their comfortable lead 5-1 they thought mainly to avoid of injuries. In spite of that, Petr Prucha got hit to the neck by the puck and Martin Havlat has problems with his shoulder. Their start in the quarter final in questionable.

The best player of the game was Jaromir Jagr, who had three assists. Czechs will play Team USA in the quarter final. It reminds of 2004, when in Prague the Czech Republic also beat all the oponnents and then lost to United States in a penalty shoot-out.