EVZ fail to close gap

Luck gives with one hand and it takes away with the other. After a last-gasp 2-1 win over Fribourg on Friday night where a linesman inadvertently set up the match-winner, Zug were all out of good fortune on Saturday night in their critical clash with direct rivals Langnau. Five times they hit the bar or the post and with the refereeing decisions also going against them, they slipped to a 3-2 loss on penalties.

 

Again the status quo has been maintained – Zug are still five points behind Langnau, as they were before the start of the weekend, but now there are only five games remaining with both teams facing the same opposition. Should they finish level on points, Langnau will get the nod due to their far better head-to-head record against Zug. The boys in blue therefore need to beat Langnau on 20 February, again away from home, and hope that the team from the bank of the Ilfis slip up again between now and then.

 

And yet everything in the garden was looking (relatively) rosy on Friday night. After Micki Dupont\'s power-play marker cancelled out Fribourg\'s lead in the third period, it looked as if the game was going into overtime, particularly when Patrick Fischer took a hooking penalty which meant that Zug would have to play 4-on-5 for the last two minutes of regulation. They had seen off most of the penalty when Fribourg goalie Sébastien Caron launched a final attack with ten seconds to go, propelling the puck along the boards to the left. Unfortunately, his pass found only a linesman, who in his attempts to get out of the way merely knocked the puck back into centre ice. Dale McTavish was first to react, skating two steps over the blue line and, seeing that Caron was still slightly out of position, he launched an absolute bullet over the keeper\'s left shoulder to give Zug all three points with five seconds to go.

 

Langnau won their clash with Servette in overtime, so Zug had closed the gap to four points when the two teams met at the Ilfisstadium on Saturday night for what promised to be a decider. The match ended up being littered with penalties, 15 in all, but the one that wasn\'t called may have decided the match. With no score on the board, Langnau\'s Eric Blum caught Fischer in the face with a high stick. A five-minute power-play and a game major should have been the result but no call came. And while "Fishy" was showing the referee the result of Blum\'s high stick, Langnau went up the other end and took the lead. Zug coach Doug Shedden was understandably irate, haranguing the referee who refused to look at the video evidence and even gave Shedden a minor penalty for good measure.

 

Zug went two down on the half-hour, but goals from the irrepressible McTavish and Corsin Camichel meant that game went into overtime and then penalties, with Langnau reliant on the metalwork on no fewer than four occasions as Zug rang shots off the bar and posts. Lars Weibel saved his side four times in the shoot-out, but Langnau\'s returning hero Todd Elik – also a former Zug player who had been brought in on a short-term contract to replace the injured Jeff Toms – showed all of his experience to score the decisive penalty, albeit off the bar. Fischer had the chance to equalise, but agonisingly saw his effort roll up the blocker of goalie Matthias Schoder, hit the bar and come back out. An inch either way on Elik and Fischer\'s penalties and the gap could have been a mere three points…

 

Drew Lilley