Champions Hockey League commentator Darren Kilfara is writing a three-part blog on the last three Game Days of the season. Today he begins with his account of yesterday's opening-leg Semi-Final in picturesque Davos, Switzerland.
by Darren Kilfara
DAVOS – Tuesday morning in Davos: sub-freezing temperatures, heavy snow and a biting westerly wind.
I was beyond excited. This felt like hockey weather.
We normally commentate on our Champions Hockey League games from a studio in Vienna, watching games on television monitors in small, self-contained booths – “off-tube” commentary, we call it. I don’t mind being away from the action, in a comfortable routine among familiar colleagues I like and respect. But for the CHL Semi-Finals and Final, I’m travelling to each arena: Switzerland this week, Gothenburg in Sweden next week, possibly Oulu or Rauma in Finland (or Switzerland or Sweden again) for the Final on 9 February. Attending the morning skate, talking with coaches and players, soaking in the live atmosphere of a big game…this is what I live for as a commentator.
Davos is the right place to come for a rich hockey atmosphere. Vaillant Arena looks and feels like the Noah’s Ark of Swiss ice hockey, its skeletal wooden ceiling at once somehow both cozy and forbidding. There’s a large open-air outdoor skating area next to the arena as well, but with a foot of snow on the ice and more falling steadily, there were no takers yesterday morning, although the adjacent outdoor hockey rink had been cleared by early evening.
I talked with both team’s Cramo Top Scorers during the morning skate and was surprised to discover that Frolunda Gothenburg’s Ryan Lasch – who has played for eight different clubs since 2010, including three in Sweden and two in Finland – was in Switzerland for the very first time. In contrast, HC Davos top scorer Andres Ambuehl is as Swiss as they come: soft-spoken and unassuming, but supremely confident that his team could do the job.
In the event, Ambuehl was wrong. The game finished 5–0 for Frolunda, and it was largely a mirror image of Davos’s 4–1 second-leg win in the Quarter-Finals against Skelleftea AIK: in December, everything went right for Davos, but on this January night everything went wrong. The Swiss side narrowly missed out on two goals after video review, and a third which Frolunda goalie Lars Johansson never saw was deflected by defenceman Tom Nilsson into one of Johansson’s skates and not through his five-hole. Meanwhile, Lasch got his sixth CHL goal of the season thanks to a lucky deflection off the skate of the sprawling Felicen Dubois, while Jacob Larsson scored Frolunda’s fifth goal on a fluttering, knuckling shot which Davos goalie Leonardo Genoni somehow missed. And every 50–50 officiating call seemed to go the visitors’ way as well.
I didn’t perform flawlessly behind the microphone, either, having initially misidentified Lasch as the scorer of Spencer Abbott’s opening goal. You tend to beat yourself up over these things as a commentator, but in general I think I adapted well to the live rink environment from my usual off-tube setting. I’m disappointed the second leg isn’t likely to be competitive, but that won’t stop me from going to Gothenburg and giving it my best shot; I only hope Davos does the same, because the great thing about hockey is that sometimes you never know what just might happen.
Darren Kilfara will be providing English-language commentary on the second leg of the Davos–Frolunda Semi-Final next week as well as the CHL Final in February – you can find him on Twitter at @DKilfara.