First use of the "floorball-temple" Globen: it looked like every A-group team should have been awarded to play at least once in this arena, thus the schedule there started with a single match on Friday evening, in which Italy faced Norway to battle for place 7. Italy was surely pleased with it and avoided being sent to Group B. On the other hand, Norway surely did not imagine that they play for the 7th place after tieing Switzerland in the round robin.
The tournament organizers did not seem to think that any spectator would be interested in this match - it was even thought that this match was held without public. Obviously, they seem to have seen that this would have been a sportsmanlike scandal, so they made a "Diet Globen" show out of it: all the normal stands were closed, there were just some seats directly around the rink, which were at some time nearly taken completely by more than 500 spectators. This number might have been even bigger, as there was free entrance, but the admission to the seats was by a very hidded backdoor VIP entrance, which was not signed out anywhere. Apart from that the press room was closed as much as any refreshment shops - so there was nothing to eat and drink in there and no sensible place to work for the media - because of all of that, I have to call this Friday, 26th of June, 2006, the saddest and darkest day since I visit World Floorball Championships. By the way, the small daily programme was not printed at that day, too - this match as well as the B-group semifinals in Botkyrka did not seem to be "appropriate" enough to do that.
Forgot to mention something about the match: both teams started quite defensively with Italy scoring the first goal of the match in the 7th minute. Norway tied the score nine minutes later and as both teams played on a similar level, it looked like they would be tied after 20minutes. But in the last minute of first period, Norway managed to score twice in 16 seconds, which turned the match completely. From now on, Norway was just too strong for the Southern Europeans and rolled over Italy with a final score of 11:3. Definitely, they deserved to win this match, but somehow, this did not seem to be important any more to me after this sad day at the World Floorball Championships 2006.