4 Goal Jarolin Haunts the Phantoms

Bison 6 Peterborough Phantoms 1

7/1/17

Bison and the Phantoms enjoyed a titanic tussle for the title last year. Both teams currently languish some way of the pace set by the table topping Telford Tigers this season, but last night’s encounter prove no less a robust, competitive and exciting engagement than the ones we saw between these two teams last season when everything was at stake. Star of the evening was René Jarolin with a 4 goal haul. Not content with that he bagged 2 assists as well. Why ever he was given his P45 by Milton Keynes Lightning last season remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as Churchill might have suggested.

There seemed to be only one team in the game in the first period. Bison hammered away at the Phantoms with little respite, making the Phantoms look very unscary. The homesters’ dominance was to pay off with a go ahead goal in the 4^th minute. A shot came in. The Phantoms were unable to freeze or clear the puck and it remained in the blue paint in front of goaltender Adam Long’s net. (Don’t confuse Adam Long with Nathan Long or Ciaron Long – they are 3 different people unlike Vanya and Ivan Antonov who are two). Anyway back to the blue paint scramble. Blistering biriyanis! What efforts they all went to to force the puck either into the net or away from the net, depending on which side you were playing for. It was pandemonic and pandemoniacal pandemonium. Eh? OK chaos then. The puck suddenly squirted out from the mêlée in a direction which suggested that it had been ghostly stick doing the propelling. Alas for the Phantoms it went straight to Jarolin, who rifled it straight back and into the net. The goal light would have come on, but wasn’t working. Something malfunctioning in Planet Ice? Surely not? Anyway it mattered not a jot as Referee Pickett had seen it go in and his flat hand pointing netwardsly (that’s not a real word but it should be) confirmed that it was 1-0 Bison. Dangerous Derek Roehl and Aaron “Billy” Connolly were clearly involved in the blue paint scramble as they were awarded assists. 1-0 Bison.

There were no more goals in P1. Bison had played so well it had looked as if the Phantoms hadn’t turned up at all. During 20 minutes of play Bison netman, Tomas Hiadlovsky, had to get in the way of only 3 ghostly shots on target. And he did. P2 turned out to be not much better for the Phantoms than P1 had been and they subsided to a 3-0 deficit before resurrecting their chances by pulling one back before the second buzzer, as I shall relate, dear reader. I jump ahead. Let us return to  the 7^th minute of P2. It was then that Bison increased their lead. The goal followed penalty calls for each team. Bison ended up with just under a minute of power play, but could not find the net. However, they kept up the pressure and 20 seconds after the power play had ended they scored. Jarolin  passed back to Connolly lurking near the point. He wriggled and jiggled and then slewed a cross ice pass to Declan “Barrack-O” Balmer, all alone and without a Phantom friend in the world near him. Chunderous defending really. Imagine you have a tube of Colgate and you drop a 10 ton weight on it. The toothpaste would leave the tube with great velocity. And in such a manner did the puck leave the ice as Balmer’s stick crashed down. It flew with the velocity of an exocet missile into the net. The goaltender would have had more chance of stopping a human cannonball fired at him from point blank range. Fortunately this was not attempted. 2-0 Bison.

Bison’s 3^rd goal came on 30 minutes and it was to prove a masterpiece of quick thinking,  improvisation and deadly finishing. The move involved Connolly, Roehl and the bespectacled René Jarolin. Well I say bespectacled, but I assume he wears contact lenses to play otherwise we would have a Mister Magoo situation on our hands. Roehl lifted the puck high into the air and forward to Jarolin who caught it, dropped it, skated forward and unleashed an unstoppable wrist shot past the hapless goaltender Long, for whom it was beginning to prove a long night. 3-0 Bison.

 The Phantoms were not quite dead and buried, however, and in the 32^nd minute they pulled one back with James Archer snapping home Wehebe (strange name) Darge’s pass from behind the goal line. An apple also to Darius Pliskauskas. 3-1 Bison.

3-1 to the bad at the end of P2 was just about as much as the visitors could have hope for, so outplayed and outshot they had been. But with only a 2 goal deficit they were still very much in the game. Alas things started to go downhill for them at the halfway stage of P3. Just before the 50 minute mark Nathan Long was adjudged by Referee Picket to have hooked. What was the sentence to be? 10 years hard labour in the Siberian salts mines? No only 2 minutes in the box. But Long’s long sentence was to be reduced, not for good behaviour, but because Bison were to score on the power play, as it turned out. On 50:04 Long Ciaron Long fired in a long shot on Adam Long, who saved it. Alas for the hapless netman the puck went straight to the deadly assassin known as René Jarolin and he buried it. 4-1 Bison, a hat-trick for Jarolin and a bit of daylight between the teams.

In the 55^th minute scrappy play in mid ice saw Long Ciaron Long take possession of the puck and send Roehl on his way with a lightning break up the left wing. He delivered an across the crease pass and there at the back door was Jarolin. The timing of his arrival would have impressed even Abraham-Louis Breguet. Who? See footnote. He hammered into a wide open net for his 4^th goal of the evening. 5-1 Bison.

On 55 minutes Tom Stubley, as opposed to Uncle Tom Cobley, who is someone completely different, was accused and summarily convicted of tripping. A 2 minute stretch of solitary without even bread and water awaited him. He must have longed for remission so he could get to Widecombe Fair mounted on Tom Pearce’s grey mare (oh no that’s Uncle Tom Cobley) and he got it, but alas it was at the expense of another Bison goal. Jarolin and Long combined to set up Tomas “Grandmaster” Karpov to blast home from in front of the net. 6-1 Bison. When a student I was involved in the construction of a human pyramid in the garden of a pub in Southsea. Alas we failed to appreciate the problems which could arise, not also from the consumption of excessive quantities of alcohol, but also by putting Stu Parsons at 5’5” next to Rich Lock at 6’4” in the bottom row of the pyramid. The ill conceived construction was doomed to come crashing down. And indeed it did. In a similar fashion the Phantoms’ hopes of winning the game crashed to earth with Bison’ 6th goal. Prior to that they had been in with a shout only 4 goals to the bad and with 4 minutes to play, but now their hopes and aspirations were well and truly killed off. They must have been relived when the final buzzer sounded.

All that remained was to award the Top Banana beers. Petr Stepanek, who chose on this occasion not to pick a fight with Tomas Hiadklovsky as he did last time, was adjudged to have been the most scary Phantom. Long, Roehl and Connolly each had 0+3 evenings, but there could be only one recipient of the Bison beers – René Jarolin with 4+2 to his name. The Che Guevara impersonator in Block C expressed the view that Jarolin hadn’t done very much. The Man in the Charlestown Chiefs shirt disagreed and I had to step in between the two to prevent an unseemly altercation of the most atrabilious kind.

Footnote : Swiss horologist Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747-1823) is widely regarded by chronology aficionados (I’m not one of those) as the greatest watchmaker who ever lived. His most amazing timepiece was the “Marie Antoinette” which took 44 years to design and build. See below….