"I have never seen the like of this sports competition. Every single player on the rink was a perfect acrobat on the skates, skated at tremendous speed without regard to himself or anyone else, jumped over sticks and players with ease and grace, turned sharply with perfect ease and without losing speed, and skated backwards just as easily as forwards. And during all this, the puck was held down on the ice and was dribbled forwards by means of short shoves of the stick. In bandy you often have to play the ball in the air to pass it, but here the puck was kept gliding on the ice without interruption, even though the space for each player was less than a third of that in bandy.

How the players were able to rush forward at such high speed and thread their way through the attacking opponents together with the long stick and puck on this insignificant space, where the distance between team mates and opponents hardly ever reached one metre, is quite beyond comprehension and had to be seen to be believed. In soccer and bandy you say that there can be much pressure on a player, but the worst situation in these games is as sitting in a comfortable armchair compared to what these players did to one another.

The players attacked each other with a roughness that would have sent an ordinary bandy player far into the next week, and you might possibly have a notion of what it was all about when the small Canadian defender Johannesson at one time was pushed headlong into the barrier board, so that it was cracked. However, he happily continued to play on, as if nothing had happened.

The small puck was moved at an extraordinary speed around the rink at all directions, so that the spectators almost became giddy, and the players fought for it like seagulls, that flutter about after bread crusts from a boat. In the same daring manner the players dived for the puck and turned away in a circle if anyone else had retrieved it, so as to glide round and try to get into a better position for capturing the coveted thing.

And there were shots at goal! At the worst speed the players had such extraordinary control that they confidently could send the puck towards the goal so hard that you could not follow it with your eyes. When you previously had seen the goalkeepers in their thick leg-pads which almost covered half of the goal, you had imagined that they only had to stand still to deal with the shots.

But in this game you could see that there really is such a thing as goalkeeping. Because not one of the shots were directed towards the goalkeeper, but instead aimed at the bottom comers of the goal, preferably a few decimetres above the ice. The goalkeepers had to dart about like mad, and be active all the time, sometimes using their feet and sometimes their stick, and they had an inconceivable ability to be in the right position to fend off the ball, even before the spectators had had time to realize there had been a shot. A few times the Canadian goalkeeper had to stop the puck with his hand, and despite his thick gloves his fingers were smashed until they bled. not soft."