Bison 4
Bracknell Bees 2
17/12/16
OK It wasn’t the Dogs it was the Bees, but if I’d
said Bees it would have spoiled the alliteration of my headline. So for the avoidance
of doubt it was the Bees, THE BEES, THE
BEES.
Bison dominated the early passages of play, but
it wasn’t until the 6th minute that they broke the deadlock. A Bees’
D-man (sorry I don’t know who that was or I could name and shame him) had
possession of the puck on the blue line. As he dithered, disaster struck.
Dangerous Derek Roehl jabbed in his stick, dispossessed him, burst past him (it
wasn’t the D-man’s day) and was in on goal. Roehl wasn’t going to mess about
with any fancy deke. He rifled an unstoppable wrist shot past the luxuriantly bearded,
but also follically challenged Alex Mettam and into the net. Perhaps the shot
was stoppable, but clearly not by Mettam. An unassisted goal surely as the
D-man had control of the puck before his downfall. But no. Assists were awarded
to Long Ciaron Long and desperate Dan Davies. Why? How? Who knows? Who cares?
It’s all grist to the mill. 1-0 Bison.
Bison looked
capable of going on to run up a cricket score by the end of the first. However,
that’s not the way things turned out and only 3 minutes later the Bees had
levelled it. In the overall context of the game up to this point the equalising
score was robbery. It would have been appropriate if the Bees players had been
dressed as Dick Turpin. I saw no-one so attired. And it was a controversial
goal. The puck was fired in from wide by David Gaborcik. It hit the ever
popular Scott Spearing and went in as the net moved off its moorings. Did it
cross the line after the net moved off? Had Spearing interfered with goaltender
Hiadlovsky by bundling him over in the crease? Had Spearing thrust his shoulder
forwards to deflect the puck in? On any one count the goal would be washed off.
Alas for the Bison backers Referee Cloutman, who we are led to believe has been
to Specsavers, saw none of these and his flat pointy hand thrust goalwards
indicated that the scores were level.
As the period
progressed towards a conclusion it looked as if Bison’s efforts were not going
to bear fruit or at least as much fruit as could be found on one of Carmen
Miranda’s head dresses. Carmen who? See footnote 1. But no or rather yes they
were to bear fruit on 18:45. Roehl fed Tomas “Grandmaster” Karpov, who skated
across the front of goal and unleashed a shot which was saved, but the puck
squirted straight to Kurt “The Scissors” Reynolds. He banged it home off a post
and it was 2-1.
P1 finished and P2 opened. Bison
were once again the dominant team, but just could not score. Was it going to be
like last week when they lost to an inferior team because they couldn’t find
the gaps between goaltender and goal frame? It was looking that way until
32:59. Had Shakespeare been present might have said “the tomfoolery amongst the
bawbling jesters of the Bees’s defence was a comedie much admir’d by the merrie
folk of Basingstoke.” Eh? Well alas for the Bees their comedic defending
produced a chunderous outcome. From inside his own defensive zone René Jarolin
with the eye of an eagle threaded a pass through the eye of a needle to Roehl,
who lurked completely unmarked between the red line and the Bees’ blue line (or
at least, as far as Planet Ice is concerned, between where these lines should
be).
Could the Bees’ D-men catch him, as he moved forward with the speed of a
thoroughbred racehorse, while they trailed in his wake like a bunch of
lethargic dray horses? Of course not. Roehl barrelled forward and sniped a
wrist shot past Mettam in more or less exactly the same fashion as he had for
Bison’s opener. The hapless goaltender couldn’t have been happy and may have
made a mental note to cross Roehl off his Christmas card list. 3-1 Bison.
It wasn’t looking good for the Bees, but they
held out for the remainder of the period and even grabbed another goal. With
only 19 seconds left on the P2 clock Shaun “The Sheep” Thompson whipped in a
shot, which dislodged Hiadlovsky’s water bottle. Is nothing sacred? Assists to Martin
Pavlicek and Spearing. 3-2.
And so in to P3
we passed and we witnessed a period littered with penalty calls – 11 in total,
including a 2 + 10 on Shaun “The Sheep” Thompson for a head check on Karpov,
which, knowing Shaun “The Sheep”, as we do, must surely have been unintentional.
However, it did leave Karpov in a dire
state, but hockey players are made of stern stuff and, and I am sure to Shaun “The
Sheep’s” relief, Karps returned to the ice later in the period. The only goal
of the period came in the 45th minute. Once again the Bees’
defending was both chunderous and blunderous. Is Jimmy Hoffa (see footnote 2)
sleeping with the fishes? Or maybe propping up a flyover encased in concrete?
Or buried under one of the end zones in Giants’ Stadium? Who knows, but what we
can be sure of is that he disappeared off the face of the earth in 1975. In a
similar fashion the Bees’ D also disappeared off the face of the earth once
again. To describe accurately the full enormity of the ineptitude of the
defending would require the descriptive skills of a wordsmith greater than I.
Suffice it to say that Reynolds and Long combined to put Desperate Dan Davies
through and in on goal. The Colossus of Rhodes had a huge 5-hole, as you can see from the
picture below. Mettam also has a large-ish 5-hole, not as large maybe as the
Collossus’s, but certainly large enough for Davies to drive the puck through it
and into the net after a bamboozling deke. 4-2 Bison.
Some may have said that the Bees chances of
winning the game had now all but evaporated. However, evaporation is defined as
the process by which a substance in a liquid state changes to its gaseous state
as a result of changes in temperature and/or pressure and, as the visitors’ chances
were never liquid or gaseous in constitution, the expression is clearly nonsense.
Let’s not split hairs. Although there was plenty of time for the Bees to mount
a comeback, realistically it was Goodnight Vienna.
However, the
excitement was not over. Towards the end of the period we witnessed an
extraordinary incident. The puck was played forward and Shoeless Joe Miller
raced after it clear of the Bees’ D, who must have been looking for Jimmy Hoffa
rather than defending their goal. Mettam, by his actions, clearly thought there
was going to be no tomorrow – he was wrong as it proved. He had been sniped
twice by Roehl and then 5-holed by Davies and must now have been thinking there
were more holes in him than in Ena Sharples’s hair net. He thought he’d try
something different and came charging way out of his goal to pokecheck the
puck. What was he smoking? He came nowhere near the puck and Miller rounded
him. Alas for Joe he couldn’t shoot into the goal from such an acute angle and
took the puck around the back of the net. By the time he emerged at the back
door the Bees’ D had abandoned their search for Jimmy Hoffa and were back in
force. Joe’s shot was blocked and Mettam’s blushes were spared
In the dying
seconds Mettam was pulled from the net, thankfully not by his luxuriant beard,
for a 6 on 5, which bore no fruit (it had doubtless all been used to create
Carmen Miranda’s head dress). However, it afforded the opportunity for Bison
netman Hiadlovsky to have a crack at an empty netter. Alas it went well wide,
but it was an exciting moment that had the crowd ooh-ing and ah-ing. The period
ended and it was a win for Bison. Not a classic, but had Farmer Hoggett been
the coach he might have said “That’ll do, pig”. Roehl and Mettam were elected
Top Bananas.
Footnote 1 : Carmen Miranda was a was a Portuguese-Brazilian
samba singer, dancer, Broadway actress, and film star who was popular from the
1930s to the 1950s. Her trademark headdresses frequently contained real fruit.
Footnote 2 :
Jimmy Hoffa was head of the Teamsters trade Union in America from 1958 until
his mysterious disappearance in 1975 and one of the most powerful men of the
era. No-one knows what became of him, but there is compelling evidence that he
was “rubbed out by the mob.”
No comments:
Post a Comment