With their overtime win against Villach, Fehérvár AV19 wrapped up the middle section of the season in fourth place.
At the beginning of the season head coach Rob Pallin proved everyone wrong as he lead the team to a regular season 6th place finish like he promised, he followed this up by improving two spots in the middle round with a 4th place finish, again as he promised, and now have home ice advantage as they will face the Vienna Capitals in the first round of the EBEL playoffs.
Pallin not only led the team to 4th place but also turned the team from a two line squad into one that can regularly run four lines out for all three periods of the game as well as having two solid goalies. During this 10 game stretch goalies Miklós Rajna and Christian Engstrand played every other game as Pallen wanted them to not only stay fresh and healthy in the stretch run but also have them face every team at least once to gain some game experience.
During this ten game middle round the coaching staff had to shuffle the lines up a bit because of injuries and also rest for some of the older guys, because of this the younger forwards had some significant minutes, which paid off as Csanád Erdély, Péter Németh, Péter Vincze, and Tamás Sárpátki all scoring important goal during the games with Sárpátki scoring the only goal in the 1-0 OT win against Villach.
Vienna who finished just behind Volán in the standings split the season series 3-3, the Capitals won three out of four during the regular season but lost both games to Fehérvár in the middle section which ended up leading to the sacking of head coach Tom Pokal. The Capitals are led in scoring by Kris Foucault and Jonathan Ferland who finished with 44 and 39 points respectively.
These two teams have met in the playoffs before in 2010 when Vienna won the first round series 4-1, the playoffs start Friday night in Székesfehérvár.
Photo: Attila Soós