Bison 2 Swindon Wildcats 1 (shoot out)
20/1/18
There are those
who have bemoaned, bewailed and bellyached about this season’s hockey. Surely
not? Verily there are also those, possibly the same people, who have
disparagingly, deprecatingly and derogatorily denounced the quality of
entertainment in the NIHL. Well such gainsayers should have been there last
night (perhaps they were) to see this edge of the seat encounter between two of
the heavyweight NIHL-ers, culminating in a white knuckle shoot out and a
stunning game winning glove save by Dean Skinns from Aaron Nell’s penalty shot
attempt. Oh dear I really have jumped ahead a trifle too far this time – to the
end of the game, in fact. There is more to tell, so I invite you to read
further, dear reader.
Let’s move to
the 13th minute of P1. Rabbit’s Foot Joe Baird steamed into Max
Birbraer and the latter crumpled to the ice. “Oi matey! You can’t do that,”
said Referee Matthews and he was right. 2 minutes in the box for the cross
check. This put the Cats on the power play and they made it count. The scorer
was Edgars Bebris with one hell of a clapper. (As you know if you are a regular
reader of this nonsense, I have trouble with players with “S” on the ends of
their names – how many of Edgars Bebris are they - 2, 4?) Actually only one and
it was that one who received a cross ice pass from the slot to just inside the
blue line by one of the Aaron Nells (there are two of them –
one coaches and the other plays) on 14:32. The Bebris stick was raised and crashed down on the
ice to convert the pass into a goal attempt. The puck left the ice with the velocity
of toothpaste being ejected from a tube as a ten ton weight falls on it. There
did not seem to be a screen in front of Skinns, so the shot must have beaten
him for sheer pace. Into the net the puck flew and it was 1-0 Cats.
There was no
more scoring in the 1st, so into the 2nd we moved and it
was at the half way point that Bison pulled it back to a level game. It was a
power play goal with Chris Jones (as opposed to Corporal Jones or Miss Jones)
banged up in the slammer for boarding both Antonov twins, Vanya and Ivan, although
I must confess to being somewhat perplexed as I didn’t see either of them actually
hitting the boards from Jones’ challenge. Oh well Mr. Matthews knows best. It
matters not a jot for what hanging offense he was in the box. The fact is he
was in the box. Let’s move on.
On the 7th of
November 1974 Richard John Bingham disappeared. Who? Why Lord Lucan of course. That's him below.
What relevance has Lord Lucan to this game? Well in
the middle of P2, as I have already mentioned, (30:35 gone to be precise), the
Cats’ D disappeared in a similar fashion to Lord Lucan. The only differences
were that in this case the homicide of nannies was not involved and also the D
were seen again, but only after Bison had levelled the game. Slick out of D
passing between Stuart “The Cat” Mogg and Rabbit’s Foot Joe Baird found an all
alone Ryan Sutton in the neutral zone without a Cat between him and the goal.
He charged forward, not in a Puffing Billy-esque manner (Puffing who? A steam
locomotive from 1814 with a top speed of 5 mph - see below), but more like von Ryan’s
Express (von Ryan’s what? A film from 1965 with Frank Sinatra - see below). He closed in
from wide to the goaltender’s right and unleashed a snipe which clearly had the
accuracy of an Agincourt archer’s arrow and the bamboozlement of a Tommy Cooper
magic trick, as it flew into the net past an astonished Renny Marr. The Bison crowd
voiced their appreciation. Some shouted “HURRAH!”, others “YAHOO!”, others
still “BRAVO!”. I am reliably informed by Duracell Man, a taken-root incumbent
of Block D, that, from his position of as near juxtaposition to the goal at
that end as you can get, Sutton skated past blowing kisses to the crowd. Some
may have regarded this as an outrage to public decency. 1-1 and all to play
for.
1-1
it
was at the sound of the buzzer to signify an end to P2 hostilities.
To say that P3
proved to be edge of the seat would be an understatement. With so much at stake
neither side wanted to lose and a shot count of 8 to 5 in Bison’s favour
illustrates it wasn’t gung-ho for the win. Then with 5 minutes left the Cats
got a power play with Roman Malinik adjudged to have raised his stick too high.
The Bespectacled Youth immediately descended into a state of pessimism as he
wallowed in a cess pool of the most abject defeatism. “They'll score from this,”
he said. But they didn’t. In fact, the best opportunity of a go ahead goal fell
to Bison. Sam Bullas was guilty of poor puck control and then loss of balance, miscontrolling
the puck in the neutral zone and then falling to the ice in a manner most
ignominious as he tried to prevent the Antonov twins from taking possession. He
failed and suddenly the Antonovs were in on goal and shooting. Marr saved
Bullas’s blushes and blocked the shot. You owe him a beer, Sam.
Both sets of
fans must have been relived when the final buzzer sounded. A point each. The
usual nerve wracking experience of overtime followed with neither side breaking
the deadlock. And so into the even more nerve wracking experience of a penalty shoot
out. The first 2 attempts from Malinik and Jones were both saved. Desperate Dan
Davies was next for Bison. His bamboozling of Marr with one of the cleverest
dekes you are ever likely to see was a masterpiece worthy, had it possessed
physical form, of hanging in the Tate. In the Monty Python parrot sketch the
Norwegian Blue remains stationary and unanimated throughout. As the puck slid
across the line from Davies’s final prod past a hopelessly floored Marr, the
Bison backers behaved in a horizontally opposed manner to the aforementioned
fowl. Jumping up from their seats, waving their arms in the air, shouting, kissing
each other and weeping for joy, they showed their delight at Davies’s scoring
of the go ahead goal.
Next up was
Bebris. His shot flew high over the bar and would have reached the moon had the
plexi not stopped it. Then Josh Smith had his shot saved, which left it all
down to Cats’ player coach Nell, a deadly marksman if ever there was one. He
had to score. Once again the Bespectacled Youth descended into a state of funereal
pessimism. “He’ll score,” said he. But he was wrong. Nell’s attempt to find the
top corner of the net failed as Skinns threw out a gloved hand, like a frog
with a long sticky tongue going for a fly, and deflected the puck away. The
noise which greeted the goal might have led you to believe that Krakatoa had
erupted again (see footnote). Game over. Bison win.
Top Bananas were
elected. Bebris for the Cats and Sutton for Bison.
Footnote : The eruption of volcano Krakatoa in 1883
was most deadly volcanic eruptions in modern history. It had the explosive
force of 200 megatons of TNT. (10,000 times greater than the bomb that
devastated Hiroshima in 1945). 36,000 people died, many as a result of thermal
injury from the blasts and many more as victims of the tsunamis with wave
heights reaching 140 feet that followed the collapse of the volcano into the
sea. One ship was carried and dumped 1 mile inland on the crest of one of the
waves. The eruption sent a cloud of gas and debris 11 cubic miles in volume
(including lumps of rock the size of houses) 15 miles into the air, darkening
skies up to 275 miles around. In the immediate vicinity, sunlight was not seen
for 3 days. Barographs around the globe documented that the shock waves in the
atmosphere circled the planet at least 7 times. The eruption was heard as far
away as Perth, Australia, some 2,800 miles away. (NB most of the figures are
estimated).
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