Edinburgh Capitals 3, Dundee Stars 6: Hay slams '˜horrendous' display

Edinburgh Capitals bench-coach Jock Hay labelled his side's showing 'horrendous' following tonight's 6-3 home loss to Dundee Stars.
Patrik Moisio tries to fight his way past the Dundee defence. Pic: Ian CoylePatrik Moisio tries to fight his way past the Dundee defence. Pic: Ian Coyle
Patrik Moisio tries to fight his way past the Dundee defence. Pic: Ian Coyle

Indeed it was a very disappointing performance against a resurgent Dundee outfit who have done their play-off chances no harm at all following their 4-3 win over Fife Flyers on Saturday.

It was the polar opposite for Edinburgh, who failed to add to their tally of only four league wins, and followed Saturday’s 4-2 loss to Guildford Flames at Murrayfield.

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Caps, after doing well to kill off 90 seconds of a five-on-three Stars power-play, went to sleep defensively, trailing 3-0 after 20 minutes.

A furious Hay said: “The most disappointing thing about tonight is just the way we played, we shot ourselves in the foot with horrendous defending.

“On Saturday the result was disappointing, and the fact we got off to a bad start was disappointing, but we played good for 40 minutes and were unlucky not to get something out of it, but from that to how we played tonight was like night and day, defensively we were just shocking.

“In the recent run of fixtures we’ve had we felt we had a good chance of taking something from quite a few games but we’ve taken nothing, the games aren’t going to get any easier now.

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“Guys need to have a look at themselves. From a coach’s point of view a lot of the errors out there tonight we’re individual errors, not team errors and you can’t account for that. The guys have to have some pride in their work and tonight that was totally missing.”

Capitals have enjoyed tight battles with Dundee all season but let themselves down badly tonight, conceding stupid penalties, eight in all, and were thoroughly out-played to boot. Stars also profited from marking that at times was non-existent.

Caps offered nothing going forward early on, Pavel Vorobyev after he stripped Stars player-coach Omar Pacha of the puck in the fifth minute the closest the Murrayfield men came to scoring in the opening frame, but ex-Capitals net-minder Travis Fullerton saved well.

Strangely, it was the big five-on-three penalty kill that was the turning point in the game. Caps did very well to restrict the Stars power-play following penalties to Patrik Moisio and Sergei Banashkov but then fall asleep defensively as Stars scored almost three identical goals from the high slot in a five-minute spell beginning with a Jimmy Jensen strike in the 11th minute, closely followed by markers from Chris Lawrence and Marc-Olivier Mimar.

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It was a terrible period from the home side, indeed the biggest cheer from the Murrayfield faithful came following the performance of the intermission entertainment, young figure skater, Jamie Gale, who leaped and pirouetted his way through the Oompa-Loompa theme tune from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie.

To their credit, Edinburgh did win the second period 2-1 to trail 4-2 after 40 minutes. Vorobyev put the home side on the board just after the half-hour mark but Stars’ three goal-cushion was restored when Dundee-born forward Jordan Cownie, who had a fine game, raced clear to set up Anthony Mastrodicasa. However, Edinburgh gave themselves some hope as Denis Trakhanov fired home from close range after Fullerton found his net temporarily under siege as the second period drew to a close.

Caps got off to the perfect start in the third and pulled it back to 4-3, Igor Valeyev scoring on the power-play with 15 minutes still on the clock, but that was as good as it got for the home side, Stars stretching ahead again through Lukas Lundvaid Nielson and a second of the game for Jensen.

Hay lamented: “We worked hard to kill off penalties, we got ourselves back in the game at 4-3 and thought we’ll kick on from here, but we switched off again and ended the game making more mistakes.

“Soft penalties were called, but there was a couple of stupid one’s too. The referee got conned into a couple of them, but that’s no excuse, we lost because we were just that bad.”