Vitkovice Ridera Ostrava are in to the Round of 16 after a pair of resounding victories and a CHL-record margin of victory on aggregate at 12 goals. 

by Vojtech Balon

No matter the big 7-0 win from the first leg, Vitkovice got off to a quick start and in the third minute of play, as David Kveton beat Valent for the first time on a 5-on-3 power play. Jakub Petr's side was clearly the better team in the rest of the first period and managed to add one more goal thanks to the youngster Vojtech Tomi.

Vitkovice forward Michal Vandras said after, “When we came here, we thought the arena would be sold out. We were glad that we scored in the third minute – it calmed us.”

“We wanted to start the game completely different than playing two men short,” Nitra coach Andrej Kmec sighed when it was all over. “Our team didn’t have enough mental or physical strength. Vitkovice were better in every aspect of the game, even more so than in the first game. Nothing is left for me to say except to congratulate our opponents on advancing. In both games, I don’t think we played as poorly as the score shows, but the result is terrible.”

In the middle frame, Nitra evened up the play but failed to produce any scoring opportunities. Things have gotten even worse for the Slovak champions as Jakub Illes made it 3-0 Vitkovice late in the second. After 40 minutes of play, the home side only managed to get nine shots on their opponent's net!

The last period begun with a 10-0 aggregate score in Vitkovice's favour and the Czech team's lead was still to increase by an even bigger margin.

With less than 10 minutes to play, an unusual sight was to be seen by the spectators in Nitra Arena: both Cramo Top Scorers, Judd Blackwater and Karol Sloboda, got into a scramble together with Nitra's Marek Slovak and Vitkovice's Lukas Klok. All of them received game misconduct penalties. Slovak received an extra minor for roughing, though, and the guests converted quickly on the power play thanks to Michael Vandas. Just a few minutes later, Roman Szturc made matters even worse for Nitra as he made it 5-0 for Ostrava in the second leg and 12-0 on aggregate.

“We said each other that we’d try to score as quickly as possible,” Nitra forward Marek Slovak said, and went on to describe the mounting frustration felt by himself and his team. “However, we got scored on very early and after that it was really hard. Fighting happens in games like that. We were 3-0 down and we were angry. We went for that at full blast – me and Judd Blackwater decided to fight and it happened. We wanted to do provide a spark – we thought it would make us start to play better. Vitkovice played really well, and it was hard to break through them. They advanced deservedly, I think.”

Vitkovice head coach Jakub Petr was impressed how solid his young team was at both ends of the ice, summing up: “We are very happy we qualified for the first time in three years to the Round of 16. The whole thing is, we came here with a young team. We've had some injuries, and some of these players had never played for men's team before. They had a lot of experienced players on the other side, and a loud crowd, so that's a good experience for their careers. I was really happy with the attitude of the whole team. We stay strong on the defensive side and obviously we scored some goals.”

Vitkovice came up big in both games of the matchup against Nitra and single-handedly deserved to make it to round two of the knockout stage.