Colossus Odrobny Colossal, But Not Colossal Enough

Bison 3 Milton Keynes Lightning 2

18/2/17

This was a must win game for the Lightning. Trailing table topping Telford Tigers by 8 points with only one game in hand, nothing short of a 2 point haul would be acceptable if they were to step up to the Elite League with the EPL title to show for their season’s efforts. Despite giving their all to a cracking competitive game, an Ooo Matron winning position for MK turned into an Oooo Betty losing one, as I shall relate, dear reader.

Things got off to a wack-o-the-diddle-o start for MK. Within 2 minutes they were ahead. Set up by Luc Johnson and James Griffin, Lewis Hook skated up the right wing, cut inside and unleashed a wrist shot past Tomas Hiadlovsky. 1-0 Lightning.

Bison came on strong, but there didn’t seem an easy way past MK’s giant Polish goaltender, Przemyslaw Odrobny, the man with the unpronounceable first name. That is until 17:15. Kurt “The Scissors” Reynolds set Ivan and Vanya Antonov charging up the left wing and across the blue line. Their netwards shot was tipped by Desperate Dan Davies. We would have liked to have seen the puck fly into the net, but Odrobny got a piece of it. Not a big enough piece, however, and the puck slid rather slowly across the line. But across the line it slid and out came Referee Matthews’ flat pointy hand, which he thrust netwards. 1-1. A massive roar emanated from the Bison blocks and threatened to multiply the problems of structural instability to the crumbling barn which is Planet Ice, Basingstoke.

Into P2 we moved. Bison stepped up a gear, but were finding Odrobny a tough nut to crack. Consider a scale of wobbliness where a Chivers jelly, a strawberry blancmange and a weeble were all factors. Bison would have preferred Odrobny to be at the top end of this scale, but he was more akin to the Berlin Wall (before it came down of course). And the defiant net minding of the giant Pole was to pay dividends for his team.

On 27 minutes Lumberjack Joe Rand took a high stick to the face. As no blood was involved, the perpetrator, Blaz Emersic, copped a 2 minute minor instead of a game penalty – curious rule that. Bison could take no advantage from the power play, but within 20 seconds of the expiry of the penalty MK were back in front. The goal was a work of art. Even the home fans’ most biased partisan, viewing the game through rose tinted glasses with a propensity for prodigious predilection for his team and suffering from a paucity of magnanimity (eh? I’m not sure I know what means myself) couldn’t help but admire the flowing move from Leigh Jamieson to Jordan Cowney to Frankie Bakrlik, who whipped a wrist shot past Hiadlovosky and it was 2-1 Lightning.

On 34:41 Lewis Christie roughed Aaron “Billy” Connolly. The dictionary defines rough as “having a coarse or uneven surface, as from projections, irregularities, or breaks”. And also “acting with or characterized by violence”. In Referee Matthews’s book the latter not the former was an accurate description of what he saw. “Oi! I’m not having that,” he said and off went Christie to the slammer for 2 minutes. It proved to be a most eventful powerplay. Early on Hook blocked a shot and the puck rebounded nicely for him. He was away and raced forward at breakneck speed. He had only Hiadlovsky to beat. He must have wished that the Slovak netman had the goal blocking capability of the waif like subject of Lowry’s “Gentleman looking at something” (what a wonderful title for a painting, eh?)

However, as he bore down on goal Hiadlo must have appeared more akin, certainly in size if not general appearance, to Sue Tilley, the model for the famous Lucien Freud painting “Benefits supervisor asleep”.

And so it proved as Hiadlo blocked Hook’s shot, more with agility than bulk it has to be said, and the score remained at 1-2. It proved to be a monumentally important save. Some might say it was the turning point of the game. Who? Me for a start. Why? You will see.

The power play continued and Bison piled on the pressure, playing the puck around and raining in shots on the MK goal. Were it not for the fact that no Latvian anarchists, police, army and Winston Churchill were involved, you could say it was getting like the siege Sidney Street 1911 (Where? See below). Eventually Lightning’s resistance cracked. Set up by Shoeless Joe Miller, Dangerous Derek Roehl sent an unstoppable wrist shot through a crowd and past Odrobny catcher side. The net rippled, on came the red light, out came Mr. Matthews’s flat pointy hand for the 4^th time in the game. The goaltender couldn’t have been happy, but he couldn’t stop what he couldn’t see. He may have said “Oh botheration” or the Polish equivalent or perhaps something stronger. 2-2.

As the period drew to a close, an unsavoury incident most atrabilious in nature occurred behind the Bison net. Frankie “Bad News” Bakrlik hammered into the head of Declan “Barrack-O” Balmer and sent him to the ice in a crumpled heap. The crowd were incensed. Some shouted “Bring back hanging!”, whilst others, possessed of a more realistic understanding of the punishments available to the officials, exhorted “Give him a game!” The Howling Man was particularly vociferous. In a characteristically incomprehensible manner he delivered his anguished diatribe of protestation at full volume. What he shouted, however, was typically incomprehensible. Referee Matthews slapped a 2 + 10 onto Frankie (that’s 150 PIMs for the season for him) and those who wanted to throw a rope over a tree branch in the Planet Ice car park calmed down at least for a moment. But then the blood lust of the Bison crowd rose again as Balmer threatened the MK bench (or rather those on it) when he eventually got back to the Bison bench and it looked as if there might be some afters, but this proved not to be the case. 

And so into the final period we moved.  Bison had outshot Lightning by 30-17 in the first two periods, but the colossal colossus Odrobny was proving obstacular (OK I made that word up) in keeping his team in with a chance of the victory. In particular he was blocking everything low, which prompted the Man with 3 Ear-Rings to say that Bison had to get the shots to lift to beat the Goliath-esque netman. And so it proved, which made me think that he, unlike myself, might know something about hockey.

The clocked ticked close to the 5 minutes to go mark and the game was on a knife edge, like the coach at the end of “The Italian Job”. Which way would it go? Another MK move broke down and suddenly Bison were away. Balmer to Antonov to Long, who skated forward with a clear sight of goal. Martin Luther King very famously had a dream. As Long Ciaron approached, Odrobny also had a dream. It was dream that he could prevent a goal. Such proved to be nothing more than a pipe dream, however, as Long Ciaron suddenly let loose an unstoppable wrist shot from wide to the goaltender’s right. The puck flew past the Odrobny blocker and into the net. Blistering biriyanis! Bison were ahead for the first time in the game. 3-2.

With 20 seconds left Odrobny finally managed to get off the ice for a final 6 on 5. Then with only 8.5 seconds on the clock MK called a time out. As the players shaped up for the subsequent face off Bison called one. What was that all about? Whatever had been said during the MK time out was said again during the Bison timeout. I cannot imagine any new instructions were conveyed by either coach. The game restarted and Reynolds missed a long range empty net chance. That mattered not as the buzzer sounded and it was all over. 

All that remained was for the Top Bananas to be appointed. Dan Davies copped the Bison award and, unsurprisingly, Odrobny was considered the best Lightning player. A great display from him, but, alas for the giant Pole, Lightning’s hopes of winning the league title were now as good as (or as bad as) dead. Best don the black armbands and call the undertaker.