As the first coach of the already disbanded “Dynamo”, Julius Schupler, taught – every victory must be respected. Also 4: 3 bulls against Austria. One point lost will be enough with five points to get into the elite group. Unfortunately, the content of the game already showed a week ago that dreaming of the quarterfinals is not the right spring. The next match against England on Sunday.

Could Latvia really lose to Austria? If a neighbor or a mother asks, it is very important to us. As if we were in the upper hand, we feel that the Austrians “even bare and skating but we will always win”, which is coach Vladimir Rešetnikov’s somewhat interpreted assessment of the European hockey arena. Unfortunately, the puck also tends to fall into the goal of the Latvian national team, and on all three occasions when the Austrians scored from us at the world championships, Latvia was on the verge of relegation from group A. We lost a 2:5 Norway at Hamar on May 8, 1999.

Artūrs Irbe had traveled to the United States for teammate Chaison’s funeral, and Juris Klodāns, who had scored three goals in ten minutes, had to enter the goal. Andrejs Zinkovs played 2: 2, but Latvia with almost all the stars of that time (Beļavskis – Fandul – Kerch, Znarok – Vitolins – Zoltok, Ignatovich – Cyprus – Tambijev, M. Jass – Semyonov – Nizhny, Maticin – Bogic Chudinov) – Laviņš , Sējējs – Skrastiņš) was one place behind Austria, i.e. 11th place, which meant a qualifying tournament at Sheffield.

During this match, the general manager of the national team Helmut Balderis scolded the Montreal Canadiens striker Sergei Zoltok for the fact that he also needed to play for the defense – “Shestork” in Montreal. After such a false reprimand, Zoltok ordered a Latvian hockey legend where Ukrainian sailors had recently ordered a Russian warship.