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Canada thrashes Finns for bronze – IIHF

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Tournament scoring leader Chloe Primerano set records with two goals and an assist as Canada beat Finland 8-1 for the bronze medal at the 2024 IIHF Ice Hockey U18 Women’s World Championship.

With 16 points (8+8=16), Primerano established a new single-tournament points record by a defender. In addition, the 17-year-old prodigy surpassed the U.S.’s Kendall Coyne Schofield (15 points in 2009) and Canada’s Jessica Campbell (15 points, 2010) for the second-highest total in U18 Women’s Worlds history. The U.S.’s Amanda Kessel (19 points, 2009) is tops all-time.

“I think all of her teammates, staff and people involved in this program can say we’re not surprised,” said Canadian coach Tara Watchorn. “Chloe is such a hard worker. This was her coming-out stage and she did really well. But I think the coolest part is just the teammate she was all the way through the tournament. She was such a pleasure to work with.”

On Sunday, Caitlin Kraemer and Abby Stonehouse also stepped up with two goals apiece. The only previous Canadian bronze medal was in 2018.

“It says a lot about our team that we stuck together and pulled through,” said Stonehouse, who finished with 11 points. “We ended on a high note, which we’ve been talking about.”
 

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The Canadians outshot Finland 52-12, and the result was never in doubt. The Finns simply ran out of gas in their first WW18 bronze medal game ever against Canada. The Finns have won bronze thrice (2011, 2019, 2022), with no other medals.

“We tried our best, and it just wasn’t enough today,” said Finnish captain Tuuli Tallinen.

For the second straight year, Kraemer had 10 goals, one shy of U.S. forward Haley Skarupa’s single-tournament record (11, 2012). Kraemer, Stonehouse’s teammate with the Waterloo-Kitchener Rangers, also nailed down the Canadian U18 Women’s Worlds career goals record (20) over two tournaments. She ranks two goals behind all-time leader Coyne Schofield, who took three tournaments (2008-10) to rack up 22 goals.

“She’s a really special player,” Watchorn said of Kraemer. “She was a great leader for us this time around, and it was fun to watch her play and elevate the people next to her.”

Mackenzie Alexander had a goal and an assist, and Maxine Cimoroni also scored for Canada.

Finnish scoring leader Emma Ekoluoma replied with her eighth goal of the tournament. Kuisma summed up the 17-year-old Karpat Oulu sniper’s future: “Pretty shiny! She’s a huge player and a huge person off the ice. She keeps both feet on the ground.”

Watchorn had to get her players refocused after a heartbreaking, unprecedented 4-2 semi-final loss to the Czechs. That ended Canada’s reign as two-time defending champions.

“I think it taught us a lot, just to not take any game for granted,” Primerano said. “You have to come out flying every game. Every team is good in this tournament. Next year, we’ve got to come out and work as hard as we can and try to not let what happened this year happen again.”

Rhyah Stewart appeared in net for Canada as number one goalie Hannah Clark was sidelined due to a semi-final injury. Finland’s Kerttu Kuja-Halkola got her sixth start.

Canada hammered Finland 10-0 in the preliminary round, and this affair wasn’t much different.

Alexander opened the scoring at 4:54. She got the puck from Primerano with speed in the neutral zone, cut into the high slot, and whipped a shot past Kuja-Halkola’s blocker.

Primerano’s assist lifted her past Brigette Lacquette (2+11=13, 2010) for the points record for defenders.

Kraemer hailed Primerano: “That’s pretty special to come out as a first-year and have that type of impact. It’ll be exciting to see what she does for the rest of her career, because she has a lot of promise, and she’s also a great teammate.”

Canada controlled the game early on with strong puck movement, keeping Finland bottled up in its own zone. Stonehouse doubled Canada’s lead at 12:19, firing a bad-angle shot that went in off defender Nelly Andersson’s stick.

Seconds after Canada’s first power play expired, Stonehouse jumped on a loose puck and beat Kuja-Halkola over the glove to make it 3-0 at 18:22. First-period shots favoured Canada 21-4.

Just 1:45 into the second period, Kraemer went to the net and tipped in a nice feed from Alexander. A lucky bounce made it 5-0, with Jessica MacKinnon’s shot bouncing in off Cimonori’s skate. 

Kraemer, unguarded in front of the Finnish net, scored on the power play at 11:17 to make it 6-0, courtesy of a nice Stryker Zablocki pass from below the goal line.

Ten seconds after a potential Jessica Pellerin goal was nullified for a kicking motion, an unfortunate incident saw Finland’s Emmi Loponen stretchered off after a run-in with Pieckenhagen along the side boards. The Canadian received a boarding minor on the play.

Primerano got Canada’s seventh goal shorthanded on the rush with a laser at 18:15.

In the third period, Primerano deked her way to the net for an 8-0 lead at 10:56. Ekoluoma was mobbed by her teammates after ending Stewart’s shutout bid at 11:44. It was a little bit of consolation.

The Finns have had a tough bronze-medal game draw two years in a row. In 2023, they lost 5-0 to the U.S. in Ostersund, Sweden.

“Obviously it feels like it’s unfair,” Kuisma said. “But what can you do? You have to win the right games.”

Finland has only beaten Canada once at the U18 Women’s Worlds. Goalie Emilia Kyrkko starred with 40 saves in a 2-0 win to open the 2022 tournament in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

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Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

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A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

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The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

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Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

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TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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