19th August

EuroFloorball Cup Qualification West starts today

The EuroFloorball Cup 2009 kick off will be today as the first Qualification tournament will start in Austria. The EFCQ West will be played during this week in Leoben and Kapfenberg, starting today and ending to decisive matches on Sunday. The first Men´s matches will be played today in Leoben and the Women´s tournament will begin on Friday.

The national champions of Western-European countries, which were not directly qualified to the EFC Final Round, will play in the EFCQ West.

The Western qualification tournament consists eight men´s teams divided to two groups and four women´s team in one group. Teams in each group will play against each other once. Totally there will be 12 teams from nine different Western-European countries in the tournament.

In men´s tournament after the group stage the two best teams from group A and B will play in Semi-Finals and the last two of both groups will play for standings 5th-8th. The Semi-Final winners will play in the Qualification Final for the one spot to the Men´s EFC Final Round.

The women´s tournament will start on Friday 21st of August and after last matches of group stage on Sunday, the winner of the group will be qualified to the Women´s EFC Final Round.

Follow EFCQ West on-line

It is possible to follow all matches from EFCQ West from IFF on-line match records, which will be updated during the matches. The links to the on-line match records as well as statistics and team rosters can be found from IFF EFCQ West page.

There has been media coverage of the tournament already before the first matches are played. Read more about the pre-tournament stories from newspapers of Leoben (in German):

• Kleine Zeitung: Europacup als Startschuss
• Leoben Promt: Qualificationsrunde des Euro-Floorball-Cup in Leoben und Kapfenberg

20th August

EFCQ West started with clear victories

The EuroFloorball Cup Qualifications started in Austria, where the EFCQ West is played during this week. There were four matches played in Leoben in men´s EFCQ West tournament.

The group B matches started the tournament at noon and the favourites, German UHC Sparkasse Weissenfels and Spanish CUF Leganes, took easy victories over their opponents.

Most effective players were Magnus Olsson (3+2) from CUF Leganes and Valentin Erben (3+1) and Mikko Reuna (0+4) from Sparkasse Weissenfels.

Group B results from Wednesday: 

IFK Paris – UHC Sparkasse Weissenfels 2-10
SSV Diamante Bozen – CUF Leganes 2-14

In group A also Dutch HDM continued the series of victories with clear margin by defeating Belgian Speedhoc Brussels. The last match of the evening was totally different, when home team VSV-Unihockey and British London Vikings played an exciting match. The even match turned to London Vikings in the third period as they were more effective in special situations. The best scorer in group A was Vojtech Sust (1+4) from London Vikings.

Group A results from Wednesday: 
Speedhoc Brussels – HDM 2-17
VSV-Unihockey – London Vikings 6-9

21st August

Tight matches in Men´s EFCQ West

The second day in Men´s EFCQ West was played in Leoben, Austria. If the numbers were big on the first day, the second day brought more even battles to the tournament.

UHC Sparkasse Weissenfels and CUF Leganes had both won their first matches, so the mutual match was important in the battle for the first place in group B.

The match started evenly and after two periods the score was 2-2. The breaking point of the match was seen in the beginning of the third period as Aki Koskinen scored twice to UHC Sparkasse and the final score was 5-2.

Also in group A the winners of the first day matches, Dutch HDM and British London Vikings met on Thursday. After tight first period London Vikings played strong second period and were able to increase the lead enough. The final score was 9-3 to London Vikings and the man of the match was Torbjörn Folkesson who produced points 2+3.

Results from Thursday Men´s EFCQ West:
Group B: IFK Paris – SSV Diamante Bozen 9-5
Group B: UHC Sparkasse Weissenfels – CUF Leganes 5-2
Group A: Speedhoc Brussels – VSV-Unihockey 5-9
Group A: HDM – London Vikings 3-9

Women´s EFCQ West will start today

As the men´s teams have already played for two days, on Friday also the Women´s EFCQ West tournament will start. There are four teams in women´s tournament and the matches will be played in Leoben and Kapfenberg in Austria. The teams will play once against each other during weekend and the winner of the group will be qualified to the EFC Final Round.

The first mathes of the tournament, played this evening, will be Spanish CUF Leganes against AustrianSU Wiener FV and Dutch UA Sonics against Norwegian Mållos Hurricanes IBK.

22nd August

EFCQ West – the women has started and the men are ready for the semifinals

The last group matches for the men in the EFCQ West were divided into two matches that couldn´t change anything, Weissenfels-Bozen 7-3 and London-Brussels 24-3 (Weissenfels & London were already group winners and Bozen & Brussels were 4th in each group), and two matches were the 2nd spot in respective group and a place in the semifinals were at stake.

In group B Leganes took on Paris in a match that had two even periods, the first and the last but in the second period Leganes outplayed Paris totally, winning the period 5-0 and the match 7-2.

In group A the higher ranked HDM was in big trouble vs the home team VSV-Unihockey from Villach.
VSV made without doubt their best match in the tournament and after an early lead they were in the lead until HDM after 57:10 reduced to 2-3 and just 49 seconds later equalized to 3-3 which also was the final result taking HDM into the semifinals.

The women´s qualification started with CUF Leganes (Spain) taking on the home team SU Wiener FV. The match was quite even with two, as it looked, nervous teams. Leganes took an early lead and more or less controlled the match to a 4-0 win.
In the second match we saw an easy victory for the Norwegian Målløs Hurricanes that defeated UA Sonics (Netherlands) 8-0. The question already after the first day is if Målløs will give any of the other teams the slightest chance to beat them.

23rd August

Leganes and Weissenfels to the Men´s final and Målløs halfway to Frederikshavn

In the women´s EFCQ West Målløs continued to win with clear figures. Today it was SU Wiener FV that was outplayed and Målløs won 14-0 – taking them at least halfway to the EFC Final Round in Frederikshavn. In the other match of the group UA Sonics defeated CUF Leganes with a last minute goal for the final score ook a more 5-4. The result was very much in favour of Målløs having defeated Sonics yesterday.

The men´s qualification had reached the placing matches and the semifinals.

In the match for 7th place Brussels was leading vs Bozen after two periods but in the last period the Italians had more power left and could win with 12-8.

Paris and VSV were even 3-3 after 23 minutes of the 5th place match but then everything started to work for Paris at the same time as VSV lost everything. Paris scored 10 consecutive goals and in the end won by 14-5.

A firm and aggressive CUF Leganes did not give much space for London Vikings in the first semifinal. The match was however not decided until Leganes had three golden minutes with less than 10 minutes to play when they went from 3-2 to 6-2 and, in the end, to a 7-4 victory and a place in the final.

The second semifinal was the other way around. Sparkasse Weissenfels took an early lead and went up to 3-0 in the beginning of the second period versus HDM. And then the play was totally even with no scoring for more than half an hour – and then Weissenfels scored again and the match was settled, finally ending 5-1 taking Weissenfels into the final vs Leganes.