Ice hockey: sound first, then hit

The fact that the past ice hockey weekend was an extraordinary one for David Elsner has a lot to do with the person David Elsner. The Straubing Tigers striker is an emotional ice hockey player – and as such he lives Bavarian derbies particularly intensely. This time he personally made sure that the Straubing Derby weekend in the German Ice Hockey League (DEL) was given additional explosiveness.

Before the derby against ERC Ingolstadt, Elsner had sounded at the press conference that he would make Ingolstadt the game “hell” – and then also explicitly tried to come to terms with the past. “To be honest, I’m glad I’m in Straubing,” said the 29-year-old. “And as hard as it sounds now: I sh … on the club, what’s going on in Ingolstadt right now.” These words came as a bit of a surprise, as the striker had played in Ingolstadt for the previous six years before moving to Straubing in the summer. How much Elsner wanted to put his words into practice was also made clear by his Tigers team-mate Marcel Brandt, who reported that he had never seen Elsner like this. David, said Brandt, was “so on fire”.

The emotional game predicted by Elsner became it. In the first third alone there were 45 penalty minutes, in the end the Straubing team won 4-1 – and Elsner scored the decisive goal. He wouldn’t say that it was crystal clear that he would score, he said afterwards Magenta Sports, “but I did everything to shoot one”. Then he apologized to the ERC for his choice of words, which had not been particularly well received in Ingolstadt. What and how he said it was due to the emotions, it should “not go down the wrong way”. The emotional Elsner runs particularly hot in derbies, he needs the fire on the ice and from the stands to make his physical game even more intense.

In his early days in Ingolstadt, Elsner referred to himself as a “psychopath” who went on the ice “to get rid of my aggressions”

Elsner’s career to date has also been intense and turbulent at times. As a 17-year-old, he caught the attention of North American scouts who were actually there because of his Landshut teammates Tom Kühnhackl and Tobias Rieder. Elsner was so unexpectedly drafted by the Nashville Predators (NHL) and moved to the Canadian Junior League OHL. Unlike Kühnhackl and Rieder, who recommended themselves for the NHL there, he could not prevail in Canada – and returned straight back to Germany after a messed up season. Since he could not really gain a foothold in the local ice hockey business, he was already thinking about ending his career in his early 20s.

But Elsner bit his way through, although in his early days in Ingolstadt he called himself a “psychopath” who went on the ice “to get rid of my aggressions”. In the Augsburger Allgemeine he did a remarkable soul striptease last season. He could not handle pressure, he said, “I am afraid that I am not good enough”. All that had to come out, the striker not only argued once with ERC coach Doug Shedden and yelled at teammates. To fight this, he organized a mental trainer, “but I don’t make that much money to pay 200 euros an hour every week.” Shedden said at the time that he was now wearing steel toe shoes because Elsner needed “so many ass kicks”.

In the course of last season, the ERC gave him to understand relatively early that he would no longer play a major role in Ingolstadt. So he returned to his homeland in Lower Bavaria.

With Straubing, he was denied a formative role in the second part of the last Tiger Derby weekend. At Straubing 3: 6 on Sunday in Munich, which really picked up speed in the final phase when the Tigers turned a 1: 3 into 3: 3 with a 34-second double strike and then lost, Elsner couldn’t Set offensive accents. That should change again on Wednesday against defending champion Berlin – at home, where the Tigers have already defeated Adler Mannheim this season. “It was always disgusting to play here in Straubing,” remembers Elsner of his appearances as opponents, “we all tear our asses off to play every home game as well as possible.” He will continue to lead the way in this discipline one time or another in the future.