Meeting France

The third opponent that Hungary will face at the 2016 A-Pool World Championships will be France, a team that they had faced during the November international break in a tournament in Norway.

The French national team is at the level where Hungary would like to be in a handful of years. Since being promoted to the A-Pool at the 2007 World Championships France has managed to stay up and had to fight off relegation only once. This is a team that always has one or two NHL players on their roster. The French team will be coached by Dave Henderson who has been coaching the French national team since the 2004-05 season.

Icehockey.hu had a chance to chat with Dave Henderson as he prepared his team for the up coming world championships.

What has been going on with the French national team since November?

In December we had a tournament in Poland where we had a young team, we ended up winning one game and losing the other two. During the February international break we played in Innsbruck and we had a similar outcome, taking one out of three games and we had a young roster again. Now we are evaluating what we have, everything is going right on schedule.

How has the pre world championships schedule been going?

We were in Belarus last weekend and this coming weekend we will be in Denmark followed by Slovakia and finish everything off in Norway.

What is the goal for the French national team at the world championships, and what kind of result would you consider a disappointment?

We play game by game, we have had some interesting results the last couple of world championships. We try to compete right from the start in every game that we play. We would like to move up in the rankings every year and cleary avoid relegation. The last couple of years we have been finishing anywhere between 11th place and 14th place, winning the tournament might be a lofty goal but we want to put in a good effort against everyone that we play.

This year France is protected from relegation since you are co-hosting the 2017 World Championships with Germany.

I have been asked that a number of times, it will be different. I will not be taking any less of a team to the world championships because of this. There is less pressure on us because of this but it is hard to judge to see what will happen with us. Usually we have been fighting in every game towards the end of the opening round and we have always had that type of team, who plays 100%. If everything goes well and positively then we have something to build off of. If it's negative then we have I work cut out for the 2016-17 season.

What changes do you plan on making to this year's roster compared to last years?

We are currently looking at players and evaluating them, we will have three decisions to make before we head to Norway for the final pre tournament games. We had a number of players who had great seasons. We have two players in the NHL playoffs so we don’t know if they will be available or not. I am not expecting a major upheaval. Every year we try to integrate a couple of young players, which as usually turned out well. We still need to eliminate offensive mistakes but we are not being outshot as much as we used to be.

How much do you know about the Hungarian national team?

They are a hard working team and very well disciplined, it will be a hard game against them. On paper they are one of the two teams who were promoted, they are an exciting team to watch. They are a hard working team that has good puck control.