Veterans’ Day in Riga

I ran into an old floorball article from 2012. Is Mika Kohonen preparing for his last WFC tournament, it asked. We now know it was not his last and neither was the next one in 2014. This time I’m not even going to speculate if this one is! A local commentator laughed as he talked about Kohonen making it to his 10th WFC in Riga.

Veteran players are an issue in this year’s Finnish floorball discussion. As they have been since 2012, actually. Mika Kohonen (39 years), Juha Kivilehto (34) and Tero Tiitu (34) are the names whose making the team have stirred the controversy. Well, 34 seems to be the decisive limit as no voices questioning the position of 33-year old Tatu Väänänen have been heard.

Are the veterans still up to it? Will younger opponents run circles around them to humiliate our team? Is head coach Petri Kettunen just clinging to the WFC triumphs of 2008 and 2010 and the golden names of those years?

Juha Kivilehto has always been an offensive defenseman. Tero Tiitu has transformed from a winger to an offensive-minded defender and years have brought Mika Kohonen deeper and deeper into his team’s own zone to build up attacks from the relative safety there. Compromises. In the WFC in Helsinki in 2010, Mika Kohonen scored 16 points, his all-time WFC best. In 2012, six. In 2014, four.

Obviously, Kettunen and his staff have considered factors further than just speedy legs. Veteran players’ experience, routine and leadership are to contribute to the team’s success in and out of the rink. In his book, the legendary Soviet hockey coach Viktor Tikhonov stated that when choosing between players in other terms equal, he will pick the most experienced one.

Before the announcement of Finland’s team, I published my own suggestion of how the team could look. Tero Tiitu and Juha Kivilehto were on my list, Mika Kohonen was not. Luckily, I do not need to carry the responsibility of actually making the decisions’ I added, and that’s true.

It is always a bit awkward to speculate about the selection of teams when you know how much more information the actual coaches have about the players’ abilities. How they perform off the rink, what they do and say in the locker room and elsewhere, how they affect the team chemistry.

For the average fan and most of the media, there’s always systematic error in evaluating a nation’s players. You see the guys of your own town’s team a lot and often playing in their home games where play is more offensive and spectacular. You remember their finest moments and forget about the more modest ones. Fans always seem to demand picking younger talent for the national team, forgetting how hard it is to rescore your spectacular goals from junior games and national leagues when playing against grown-up Swedish or Swiss men.

At least one thing is certain. In Riga, the performance of Finland’s veterans is going to be a subject of particular attention. As always, a gold medal would be a dream come true for Finland whereas missing the final would constitute a catastrophe and bring due reactions from the public.