photo: © International Ice Hockey Federation
The 2024 IIHF Continental Cup Final rolls into the Welsh capital of Cardiff, Great Britain with history in the making.
Hosts Cardiff Devils will take on Nomad from Kazakhstan, GKS Katowice of Poland, and Denmark´s Herning Blue Fox in a single round-robin series between 12 to 14 January 2024.
All four teams are previous finalists, but none have yet to hoist the much-coveted Continental Cup winners’ plate. Come Sunday, who will be adding a new victorious chapter to its club history?
Here´s what to keep an eye out for from the four teams vying for the top spot inside the 3,088-capacity Vindico Arena this weekend:
Nomad (KAZ)
Icing the youngest team in the final by some distance, Nomad from Kazakhstan´s capital Astana will arrive in Cardiff in flying form.
They were most recently in action in the Kazakh championship on Tuesday in a 7-3 win before jetting six time zones west towards Wales.
Being tight at the back and ruthlessly surging forward, Nomad sealed their ticket to the Final of the Continental Cup with a perfect record topping Group E of Round 3 in Grenoble, France.
En route to the final, Kazakh national team netminder Nikita Boyarkin was in stellar form stopping 96.15% of shots for a GAA of 1.67 in three games for Fedor Polishchuk´s coached team.
In 2019, when the Continental Cup Final previously was hosted by a British Elite League team, Arlan Kokshetau from Kazakhstan lifted the plate in Belfast. Nomad finished second in the competition back in 2018. Can they go one better this year?
GKS Katowice (POL)
Current runaway leaders in the Polish championship, GKS Katowice breezed through to the Final of the Continental Cup requiring just two games to secure qualification in Group F played in Italy´s Cortina D’Ampezzo.
Carried to victory in the Italian Alps by a vast travelling support in yellow-green-black, they are once again expected to be turning up in impressive numbers in Cardiff as the Silesians target an improvement to their third-placed finish in the Final from 2019.
It also marks a happy return to the British Isles for Katowice´s Maciej Kruczek, Bartosz Fraszko, Mateusz Michalski, Grzegorz Pasiut and goalie John Murray who all played an integral part last spring when Poland won promotion to the top division of the IIHF World Championship in Nottingham for the first time since 2002.
Cardiff Devils (GBR)
Expect a sea of red, white, and green, the colours of…
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