The Swedish curse is broken! The Swiss national field hockey team wins the duel with the 11-time world champions and advances to the semi-finals of the home World Cup. Quotes from the game.
After trailing 0:1, Switzerland manages to turn things around against Sweden and wins the World Championship quarter-final 3:1 thanks to goals from Roman Josi, Denis Malgin and Calvin Thürkauf. The semi-final will be a clash with Norway on Saturday. This is what Malgin, Niederreiter and coach Jan Cadieux had to say after making it through to the last four:
Denis Malgin
"I received a miracle pass from Josi and started moving my legs. I had a lot of space. I looked right and left, nobody left. I took the hole, looked where the goalkeeper was standing and put it in half high.
We try to play our game quickly and play the disc behind the defender. Always look forward and bring the disc forward. We did that well today.
Norway are certainly a good, young opponent, they're not in the semi-finals just like that. They're certainly a good opponent - it will be exciting.
Of course it's incredible when Roger (Federer) comes into the dressing room, lists the starting six and shakes everyone's hand."
Nino Niederreiter
"It was a very intense game. We wanted to keep the intensity high right from the start, finished every check and wanted to take their skills out of the game. They then took a 1:0 lead, which we certainly didn't intend. But the better team won today.
The win is very good. I realized that the last time we won against Sweden was in 2013. That was a very long time ago. So it feels very good.
Norway really deserve to be in the semi-finals. They've scored points against big opponents, they've beaten Latvia - you don't get to a semi-final just by luck. Accordingly, they are a very good team and we have to adapt very well to them.
We are a team that goes for each other. You could tell that again tonight. Everyone went for everyone else. I'm convinced that everyone is very proud of their own performance."
Jan Cadieux
"We will concentrate on recovering as quickly as possible. We will analyze the game against Sweden again and have a meeting with the players. After this meeting, we'll make the switch to the semi-final. It will be even more difficult than against Sweden. But in the end, we'll do what we've done so far: we'll focus on ourselves."
