TORONTO -- In the Vah River valley in western Slovakia is the town of Trencin.In the town of Trencin are the homes of three of the countrys greatest hockey icons.Every summer, Zdeno Chara, Marian Hossa and Marian Gaborik will regularly bump into one another and hang out.Sometimes theyll drop by Gaboriks hockey camp, which takes place in the arena that Gaborik built with his own money to give back to the town that gave him the game.Sometimes the Stanley Cup makes a visit, and the three stars and their friends and families will troop on up to Trencin Castle, which sits on a cliff overlooking the area, and celebrate their hockey glory and their shared past even though theyve never been NHL teammates. Chara now plays for the Boston Bruins, Hossa for the Chicago Blackhawks and Gaborik for the Los Angeles Kings.At the World Cup of Hockey, theyve again been united as members of Team Europe. As they prepare for Sundays matchup against Sweden (1 p.m. ET, ESPN) after unexpectedly qualifying for the semifinals, one wonders if they might get a chance to celebrate another victory in the town they call home. This weekends semifinal winners will face off in a best-of-three series for the championship.It might not happen again, said Gaborik, the youngest of the Trencin trio at 34. Our generation on the national level is kind of dying down a little bit, so its definitely cool to hopefully play minimum three games here. It would be awesome to get it to that next level.Team Europe is the oldest team in the World Cup. Its identity is starkly juxtaposed against the theme of this tournament, which has been all about the promise of the future, the allure of young talent such as Auston Matthews, Connor McDavid and Patrik Laine.But these three Slovak giants also remind us of the beauty of experience.Once you get to know them, its pretty clear why theyve been in the league for so long and how they handle themselves, said Anze Kopitar of Slovenia, Team Europe captain and also Gaboriks teammate with the Kings. Its just small little details or small little pieces that put the bigger picture together, and thats why they are who they are.Combined, the three have played in 3,444 regular-season NHL games. They are the owners of five Stanley Cup rings. And if I can be a bit cheeky, they are the core of what might be termed the Old Guns squad here at the World Cup of Hockey.Its something new for everybody, this project, said Hossa, 37, who will enter the coming NHL season with 499 career goals. Its lots of fun to be here.Former NHL All-Star Miroslav Satan played a few games in Trencin during a brief contract dispute in the late 1990s. He recalled playing a game with a teenage Gaborik for the town team in the Slovak elite league. The talented Gaborik scored five goals, and Satan jokes that we need to ask who set up four of those goals.Later Satan would play with Chara at the 2000 world championships, where Slovakia finished second to capture its first international hockey medal, a moment that still burns brightly for him.As the general manager of Team Europe, it was natural for him to reach out to his old pals from Trencin to help form the nucleus of a team about which no one really had a clue what it might become.These days it has become a team that is one win away from a surprise berth in the finals.I think we expected big things from them, and so far theyve delivered, Satan said. Theyre playing well. You look at that team, they are our core, they are guys whove won Stanley Cups before. We knew we could ask them to do a lot, and so far theyve been doing it.Like the North America under-24 team that generated so much attention but didnt advance from the preliminary round, Team Europe is a concept that might be one-and-done. Regardless, its something the three Slovaks have embraced wholeheartedly.First few days was getting to know each other and make sure everybody understands the concept and everything. After that it was cool, said Gaborik, who scored the first goal of the 3-0 win over the United States in the first game of the tournament. Its like an NHL team, kind of. You know you have a lot of nationalities on an NHL team, so its nothing new to us.Head coach Ralph Krueger admitted he felt there might be a little more pushback from the veteran players, especially given they had played so long for their native Slovakia. But the opposite has been true.I think whats surprised me the most is just how easy theyve been to manage, Krueger said. Its been amazing. ... Theyre almost like assistant coaches for us the whole time.In the beginning, when the NHL and the players union first contemplated how to fill out the tournament roster, they went to Chara to gauge his response. That his opinion was so valued is a measure of the respect Chara, 39, has, not just in Slovakia but in the game.Not only has he embraced the idea, he has led the team, rebounding from a shaky start during pretournament games to become a force on the blue line.Youve got to have fun playing, Chara said. Maybe its because of the importance of the tournament, the excitement of playing big games against the best players. I think its a combination of that and obviously being on a new team. Its just exciting, and winning is exciting. Its fun.At some point time will run out on these three, as it does on all athletes, even the great ones.And so an opportunity like this, a chance to suit up with longtime friends against the best in the world, even if the jersey and some of the teammates are foreign, is to be cherished.Just as the opportunity to watch them do it should be cherished. Replica Uruguay Jerseys .35 million, one-year contract that avoided salary arbitration. Plouffe batted .254 with 14 home runs and 52 RBIs in 477 at-bats last season, his second as a regular in the lineup. Uruguay World Cup Jerseys . PETERSBURG, Fla. http://www.cheapuruguayjerseysauthentic.com/ . LOUIS -- Alexander Steen scored a power-play goal with 59. Uruguay Jerseys From China .Y. - Jerome Samson scored once in regulation and again in the shootout as the St. Womens Uruguay Jerseys . The 25-year-old Japanese star has officially been posted by his club team, the Rakuten Golden Eagles. The coin is tossed towards the sky, Misbah-ul-Haq and Alastair Cook stand and watch as the Old Trafford crowd filters in. Misbah hasnt lost a toss against Cook in a Test match. But this one he does.The match hasnt started yet, but it already isnt like Lords.****Its pitched up and swinging, it just feels like a good ball even before it reaches Cook, like it has something special about it. Its the sixth ball of the first over and it finds Cooks edge and sails towards the cordon. But it doesnt find a hand. It isnt flung up in the air, it just disappears through gap and ends up at the boundary. Mohammad Amir has produced a very good ball, but it didnt get the wicket, it isnt even that close a call.Amir could have dismissed Cook twice before he actually took him at Lords, here there are no chances at all.****The ball doesnt swing much for Amir or Rahat Ali, there is no killer reverse for Wahab Riaz, and Yasir Shah cant land them. All they can really rely on is English mistakes or hope for something special. But their wizard skills dont work. Yasir doesnt land one killer wrongun, Wahab never gets one to jump up into a glove, Rahat doesnt tempt anyone with a juicy floater and Amir produces nothing to excite the world on Vine.Instead, two of the best batsmen in cricket play straight, play patient. They rotate the strike, their game plans are different, but as a partnership they look perfect for each other, one stretching the oppositions skill, the other their patience. They wait for Pakistan to make slight errors and they cash in on them. They get a lot of errors. The Pakistan quicks cant help but give away one ball an over that releases the pressure. And Yasir, well, he just isnt himself.If Lords was him in excelsis, Old Trafford was him in exasperation. Why was the ball not coming out of his hand? Why could he not find a breakthrough? Why could he not stop runs? What had happened to that guy with all that talent, to his perfect deliveries, his repeatable action? It was all gone, and it had been replaced by a nervous guy who looked like the worlds No. 1 Test bowler, but bowled like just an ordinary man.At Lords the score was 8 for 1 when Root joined Cook, and for the next hundred runs, with some help from poor Pakistan fielding, they started to take the game away. Then Yasir bowled a decent ball and Root tried to hit it into the temple across the road, and was out. England were always behind in the game from then on in, and Root and Cook didnt bat together in the second innings. That mistake, that rush of blood, that chance, never came at Old Trafford.****Watching your opponent bat for pretty much two full days should, and does, mess with teams. But part of playing cricket in the UAE is long days in the field. And one day in the field in the UAE is like 17 in most countries. And this isnt an inexperienced cricket team. Pakistan are the third-ranked team in Tests, even despite the odd innings against them that wouldnt end.But here it did affect them. The pitch didnt do anything, the ball didnt swing, the ball didnt really spin, the England bowlers were good, but not fantastic, and there was no reason other than poor cricket and mental fatigue for Pakistan to lose wickets. And there was no reason, at all, to lose them so quickly or tamely. But they did. The panic was on before Azhar Ali scooped a ball back to Chris Woakes, and it got worse when Younis Khans dancing-goat-on-a-trampoline batting was finished.And then Rahat came in as nightwatchman. By this point it was dark, the Pakistan top order only had left Shan Masoods poor Test technique and family connections, England were collecting wickets for fun, and Pakistan sent out their undeniably worst batsmen to stop the carnage. Had Misbah decided to send out a hand-drawn picture of a batsman instead of Rahat, it would have had as much chance of surviving until stumps.Rahats first action was a cut to a ball that no one who could understand either the basic job of a nightwatchman or of being batsman, would have tried. He blocked the ball with all the authority of a three-year-old giving a handshake, his feet seemed untrained by cricket coaching, he flung his bat at the ball like he was trying to score the match-winning runs off the last delivery of the innings, and then he knocked a short ball straight up in the air.At Lords, when Rahat went out as nightwatchman, he was equally useless. It just didnt matter as much. It came after Misbah had made a quality century, Pakistan had controlled the dday, and he was out so late on that his wicket caused stumps to be called.dddddddddddd As Misbah left the field he just laughed at Rahat. This time it mattered far more, and now Misbah wasnt laughing, he was going out on the field to try to stop the rot himself.****Asad Shafiq has looked like a quality Test-match batsman in every single innings in this series. He has the technique, the patience and the intelligence to average far more than he does in Test cricket. But with his side needing a hundred, or probably 150, or maybe 200, he sliced a cutter from Stuart Broad to point. On this sort of batting wicket a player of his quality should only be removed from it with a cannon. Instead he lazily wafted and was gone.Sarfraz Ahmed is capable of the sort of innings that change matches with his energy, timing and belief. And to be the sort of batsman who is scoring at more than a run a ball when your team is six wickets down and over 500 runs behind means you need to believe in yourself in a religious fanatic way. But what Sarfraz needed to do was just contain himself to 80% Sarfraz. Instead as it often is, it was the full Sarfraz, including a silly dismissal after he was well on top.And then it was Misbah, who must have felt like the only sane man in the asylum. He had coasted to 50 like the pitch was actually really good for batting and they should have put on well over 400. Instead, he was out to a spinner that he wanted to completely dominate, but has actually just started to donate wickets too.Pakistan didnt really have a top order at Lords, just these three guys in the middle playing some fine cricket. At Old Trafford, they didnt do enough of it.****Yasirs first ball in the second innings doesnt come out of his hand properly. It barely comes out at all. At Lords a ball like this would have been a surprise, an aberration, here it was the norm. It plonked halfway down the wicket like a dead pigeon and was treated with a cross-bat slap back past him by Alex Hales. A few balls later Yasir bowls even shorter, even uglier, its as if every legspinner in village cricket has somehow possessed him.The last ball of the over is short, wide and terrible again, this time Hales can only mistime it to point, but to finish the horrid over Shafiq misfields the ball.The next day, Rahat dropped short to Root, he pulled it away, in the air, and straight to where deep backward square should have been standing. Instead Masood had got lost, and rather than being on the boundary, he was in the general area of the boundary, and this shot from Root landed over his head, but inside the boundary.At Lords Root was out caught at deep backward square, at Lords Yasir was all over the England batsmen. Instead it was a bad situation, with bad cricket, executed badly, and a bad outcome.****Misbah had been in good form in both innings. He looked in control of his game, and other than a knock on the helmet, the suggestions he couldnt handle pace bowling in England seem pretty unjustified. There was no reason he couldnt have put on a big score, and at the very least given his team something. He was also batting with Shafiq, so if there was ever going to be an impossible partnership to draw the game, this was the least improbable.But then Woakes bowled a loopy wide full ball that swung away, and Misbah saw it late, and played it later. It was the sort of ball that shouldnt take out a batsman of this quality on any day, but on a day when he was trying to save the game, and had his last chance of doing so, it hurt more. Here was the man who masterminded Pakistans win last week, with bat and in the field, going out to the sort of ball he has been hitting through the covers for about 40 years.At Lords Misbah walked off smiling and laughing. Here he shook his head at the crease, he shook his head as he left the square, he shook his head as he watched the big screen, and he shook his head as he left the ground.****Wahab was caught Cook, bowled Root. Just getting back together to finish what they started. Not long after the last wicket was taken, Amir was out and it was over.Last time the match ended and Amir went on a victory lap of Lords, his team-mates followed him, and then they stopped to do a grand celebration. This time Amir walked slowly, head bowed, across Old Trafford. Like almost everything else in this match, this was nothing like Lords. Camo China NFL Jerseys Disocunt Football Jerseys Cheap NFL Gear Wholesale Jerseys 2020 Cheap Nike NFL Jerseys Cheap Authentic Jerseys Cheap NFL Jerseys ' ' '