Tornado lose at home against Compiegne and on the road in Metz
31 October 2010
In game 2 of the season, Tornado faced the likely winner of the Pool C in this year's Division 3, Les Lions Compiegne on October 9. Not a great home opener for the Luxembourg team as the loss was too high at 3-10.
While holding their own in the first 5 minutes of the game, Tornado never really had great scoring chances and had to concede the first goal at 5:28 while being on the powerplay. 3 minutes later, Compiege upped the score to 2-0 while playing at even strength.
Two powerplay tallies by Compiegne provided the 4-0 score for the first intermission.
The same story seemed to unfold in the second period when Compiegne scored their third powerplay goal, but then Robert Beran gave Tornado life when scoring the 1-5 on a nice feed from his son Thierry. Unfortunately the celebration didn't last long as Compiegne scored 4 minutes later. Thierry returned the favor to his father by scoring on his pass at the 10:49 mark of the second period, but Compiegne never really lost control of the game and the score after two periods was 2-7.
The story in the third was not much different as Compiegne cruised to an easy 10-3 victory. Noteworthy was the shorthanded tally by Julien Dequidt who stole the puck at the blue line and converted the breakaway chance.
A week later, Tornado traveled to close-by Metz for game 3 and the mighty opponent featuring numerous Russians under Russian head coach Kuznetzov made sure there was not going to be a surprise. After beating stronghold Strasbourg the week before, Metz was the Goliath that Tornado was not going to defeat.
Goaltender Philippe Lepage had a busy night between the pipes facing 59 shots, many of them on second or third rebounds.
Metz scored 4 goals in the first period, 2 on the powerplay of which one on a 5-on-3 man advantage. The score was still mild as Tornado was fighting and keeping their position.
In the second, Julien Dequidt managed to tally the visitors' only goal on a pass by Magnus Jansaker and Thierry Beran, but that should be the end of the story as Metz scored another 4 goals in the period for an 8-1 score.
In the final period, the Luxembourg squad had a better offensive game and dominated the face-offs, but had to suffer through 3 more Metz tallies for the 11-1 final score.