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JONES: Edmonton Oilers' playoff atmosphere may very well be unmatched – Edmonton Sun

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Maybe Kane, Draisaitl, McDavid and their teammates all get an assist for helping Edmonton fans reach a new level. Or maybe reaching that level inspired the Oilers themselves to create their fabulous victory to take the Pacific Division final

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The hockey world goes into Game 4 Tuesday raving about the Edmonton Oilers’ inspired performance to win Game 3 over the stunned Calgary Flames, 4-1.

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The puck people around the planet are gushing about Evander Kane’s natural hat trick to bring nearly 800 hats on the ice, to make it 10 goals in 10 playoff games.

They’re delirious about Leon Draisaitl’s Stanley Cup record four assists in one period.

And most of all, they’re beyond gobsmacked about the world’s greatest hockey player, Connor McDavid, with his ninth multi-point game of this Stanley Cup season and taking it to an even higher performance level than he’s ever achieved before.

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But there’s another storyline involving taking it where it’s never been before heading into Game 4.

Who?

You!

Maybe Kane, Draisaitl, McDavid and their teammates all get an assist for helping Edmonton fans reach a new level. Or maybe reaching that level inspired the Oilers themselves to create their fabulous victory to take the Pacific Division final.

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But after their sensational second period of the already historic happening with the return to a Stanley Cup Battle of Alberta for the first time in 31 years, I found four people in the press box more than qualified to testify to the status of the astounding atmosphere in Rogers Place.

You’d have a hard time finding a person that has witnessed more Olympic and International Ice Hockey Federation world junior and world championship gold-medal games, not to mention his fair Stanley Cup playoff games he’s attended, than former Hockey Canada head and current Oilers president Bob Nicholson.

“I’ve been to a lot of gold-medal games and I’ve never seen anything like we have here for this hockey game
“It’s the ultimate thing I’ve seen. The ultimate!

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“I’m including the Vancouver 2010 Olympics when I say that. This crowd is more electric than even that one,” Nicholson said of the night Sidney Crosby scored the golden goal.

“This has been just unbelievable. Inside. Outside. We had over 7,000 people in the Ice District outdoors. And in here, Rogers Place has never been like this.

Oilers general manager Ken Holland, winner of three Stanley Cups with 25 consecutive years in the playoffs with the Detroit Red Wings figured he hadn’t heard many crowds to compare to the one he witnessed in Edmonton in 2006, when Fernando Pisani led the Oilers to upset the President Trophy-winning Wings in the first round.

“It’s incredible. It’s not just the people in the building. I live across the street in a condo and when I came out to go to the game, there were two or three blocks of people trying to get in to that outdoor area,” said Holland. “The other night, there were more than 15,000 people in here to watch our game from Calgary.

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“I was on the other side of it in 2006. These fans can will their team to a victory. You can feel the emotion, the passion. It’s just amazing.”

In 27 years of covering three or four rounds of playoffs a season for various agencies, often jumping from one series to another in the first two rounds, TSN’s Pierre LeBrun has experienced virtually every playoff atmosphere out there.

“It gave me chills right from the anthem to start with,” LeBrun said of anthem singer Robert Clark standing in a spotlight in the crowd and singing the first few lines of O Canada and the raising his microphone in the air for the 18,347 to sing it full volume the rest of the way.

“It goes to show you, I think, that this town knows it when it sees it — knows what the game should look like.

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“In all the years I’ve covered the NHL I’d put Edmonton and Montreal up there as the only two crowds — maybe Chicago was up there for a while — where you’re not a human being if you don’t have chills. Montreal and Edmonton have the best playoff atmospheres in the NHL.”

Of all the people in the building, including Edmonton product and international soccer superstar Alphonso Davies, home from Bayern Munich, sitting in the stands wearing an Oilers jersey, my favorite to testify was Steve Mayer.

Mayer decided to return to Edmonton to experience the scene after directing, producing and even set-designing the 81 Hub City bubble Stanley Cup playoff games held in Edmonton with no fans in the stands during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic two seasons ago.

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“This is what we all live for. To have this kind of a crowd, to have this energy … We tried the best we could never, ever duplicate what we’re experiencing tonight. This is amazing. The is unbelievable.”

“It’s cool for me to go from the last time I was in the building to now. I’ll never forget what we all did in Edmonton in the bubble for the rest of my life. And I’m not going to forget this either.

“The crowd is special. First of all, the understanding of hockey here and this rivalry … I have goose bumps watching this game. This is so, so special.And I don’t know if these fans here realize just how cool this is. They’re taking it to a whole other level. This is awesome. I love it.”

E-mail: tjones@postmedia.com

On Twitter: @byterryjones

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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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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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