Great Britain Under-18s were beaten 4-3 by Finnish domestic side K-Espoo Blues in the Malmi Arena in Helsinki on Thursday afternoon.

It means one win and one defeat for the GB youngsters in their World Championship warm-up games after Wednesday’s 9-3 victory over Grankulla IFK.

Oliver Heinistö put K-Espoo Blues ahead with the only goal of the first period after 64 seconds.

Netminder Alex Oldale, who started the game, was replaced by Ben Norton at 9:13 because of injury and Kasper Pohjala made it 2-0 at 22:03 on the powerplay.

Heinistö netted his second of the game at 29:57 before Jack Hopkins reduced the arrears (36:29) at the second intermission.

Hopkins made it a one-goal game with his second (45:15) and Cameron Hamill netted the equaliser (48:54), but Elias Karjalainen scored the game-winner on the powerplay at 56:11.

Assistant Coach, Andy Brown, said: “We started much stronger tonight and got some good looks early on but didn’t finish our chances.

“We conceded against the run of play and then Alex (Oldale) took an injury which saw him leave the game. We also lost Archie (Hazeldine) during the game too.

“This meant our D had to play a lot of minutes, much of which was on the penalty kill. In contrast to last night, we didn’t really get chance to activate our powerplay but I thought our penalty kill lines rolled well.

“The boys showed great character to get the game back to 3-3 in the third at which point I felt there were a couple of dubious calls against us, which made it difficult to close the game out and ultimately sealed our fate.

“Ben (Norton) had another strong performance between the pipes coming in cold and Hoppo (Jack Hopkins) caused their D problems all night long, but we simply weren’t clinical in-front of net in the first two periods.

“We’ve had two really tough games which – with the training sessions we’ve had – have been excellent preparation ahead of the World Championship.”

GB have their final training session in Helsinki tomorrow morning before making the journey to Tallinn by ferry ahead of their IIHF World Championship.

Their Under-18 Division II Group A campaign gets under way on Sunday against hosts Estonia (14:00 UK time).