Forward Sarah Nurse broke the tie with less than five minutes left in the third period to give Canada a 3-2 win over the United States in a Women’s Hockey Rivalry Series game played in late Thursday evening in Henderson, Nevada.
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The maple leaf players thus won their first duel after three losses from the outset during this sequence of confrontations of seven games.
Nurse surprised goaltender Maddie Rooney with a shot from a tight angle that went through her pads. Blayre Turnbull and Jamie Lee Rattray also threaded the needle in a winning cause, while Kristen Campbell made 21 saves. The losers’ cue was the work of Hilary Knight and Amanda Kessel.
Rooney stopped 13 pucks.
“If there’s one thing we’ve shown over the past few years, it’s that we can find a lot of different ways to win. It won’t always be good hockey or open offensive play. In Denmark [pendant le Championnat mondial], we managed to win by relentlessly pushing hard, and I found this match to be very similar. We got our hands dirty, we won the battles along the boards and we sent pucks to the net. It’s not always pretty, but sometimes that’s what it takes,” Les Canadiens head coach Troy Ryan said in a statement.
Recall the order
The national formation obviously had corrective actions to be taken and it seems that the mission was accomplished.
“The three losses in a row were a wake-up call for us. I don’t think we had the right approach in the last series. It served as a lesson to us and we needed it. We spent a lot of time between these games and the meeting tonight [jeudi] to understand what we could all do better on the ice and, above all, off the ice to strengthen the bonds within the team. Everything fell into place and we followed our game plan,” added Turnbull.
The Rivalry Series continues Monday in Los Angeles. Previously, the Americans had won 4-3 in the shootout on November 15, then 2-1 two days later and 4-2 on November 19.