We Will Always Love You, Bison

 

Bison 2 Leeds Knights 4

9/4/23

 

They rolled away the stone covering the tomb of Lazarus and Jesus said “Lazarus, come forth!” The “dead” man emerged. He was alive. It was a miracle. On Sunday night Bison needed a miracle of similar proportions to come back from a first leg 9 goal deficit and go through to the Coventry play off finals. All they needed was 7 or 8 quick goals in the first and they would be right back in it. Did they manage it? Well sadly no, but those present on a highly emotional night witnessed a contest fitting of what may prove Bison’s last ever game, but alas nearly spoiled by officiating of the worst possible kind. We were left wondering whether Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Louis Braille and Blind Boy Fuller (see below) would have seen more than our beloved stripeys did. But fie and pish let me not dwell on the negative. And don’t rush off to make a cup of tea, dear reader. The events of the night are all laid before you. Read on.

P1 opened and it wasn’t long before Tom Banner fell foul of the law. Sheriff Belfitt said “I am the man with the tin star and you will go to the town jail for 2 + 2 minutes for high sticks”. Off went Tom to do his stretch of solitary without even bread and water (actually there may have been some water available). Bison had a 4 minute power play to defend.

 

Things didn’t go as expected for the visitors. On 5:17 the Knights’ D were caught with their trousers down, thankfully only metaphorically. Gordon “George” Norcliffe took advantage of some dilly-dally dawdling in mid ice. He ruthlessly pounced on the puck with the determination of a rodent control operative chasing a rabid stoat to deliver a fatal blow. The D-man was dispossessed. Who was he? Well I would like to say I will decline to name him to spare his blushes, but the truth is I have no idea who he was. Never mind. Gordon powered forward towards the Knight’s net like a bat out of hell. Elegance, refinement and beauty are not words that could be used to describe the movement of the Knights’ D as they tried desperately to catch the Bison captain. Indeed out of the window went poise, grace and finesse as they hammered back like billy-o. As for the Knights’ goaltender, Sam Gospel, he must have been seized with paroxysms of anxiety, his mind awash with unuttered rhetorical questions concerning the outcome of the one on one, the most important of which must have been "can I keep the puck out?" Alas for him the answer was “No”. Gordon drove the puck straight through the Gospel 5-hole to score his shortie. It was a disaster for the Knights on a par with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 as their aggregate lead was now cut to a mere 8 goals. An “Ooo Matron” moment for Bison

and an “Ooo Betty” one for the Knights.

Mr Belfitt needed to signal a goal. Being right handed, he transferred his white stick to his left hand and extended his right towards the net. A monumental expression of approbation exploded from the Bison blocks. Hats and babies were thrown into the air. The cheers were of such decibelular volume that the noise would have drowned out the eruption of Krakatoa (1881). 1-0 Bison.

 

Alas the Bison lead did not last long. 22 seconds to be precise. Still on the power play the Knights scored with a nice passage of play. The execution of the move would have impressed even Madame Guillotine. In front of the net was Matt Haywood, who tipped in. His assistants were declared as Jake Witkowski and  Cole Shudra. 1-1. The Leeds faithful breathed a sigh of relief. They had restored their 9 goals aggregate lead. At a mere 8 goals in the Knights’ favour it had looked like anyone’s game.

 

The Knights scored again before the end of P1. Matt Haywood got his twig to an incoming shot and redirected it right in front of Bison goaltender, Jordan Lawday. The hapless goaltender could only get a piece of it and must have experienced feelings of unadulterated anguish, balloon bursting despondency and Prozac popping melancholy as the puck bounced off him and across the goal line. A red light was put on behind the goal either by the goal judge or by a lady of ill repute looking for business. The referee must have realised it was the former as he didn’t ask “how much?” Had his guide dog been on the ice he would have extended his right paw towards the net to signal a goal. But he wasn’t so it was left to Mr. Belfitt to extend his flat hand in a pointy fashion and in a netwards direction. The goal was greeted by a sudden outburst of noise emanating from the visiting fans’ block, which was decibelularly (OK I made that word up) equivalent to a herd of elephants stampeding through the Serengeti as their team built up a mildly comfortable aggregate lead of 13-3. 1-2 Knights. Witkowski and Mac Howlett were declared assistants for the goal.

 

On 17:35 a bizarre incident took place. After some action at the Bison end Kieran Brown and Marcus Mitchell delivered their considered opinions to each other about the passage of play just completed in a robust and forthright manner, not quite as shown below as no physical contact was made, but with a similar quantity of annoyance with each other.

I couldn’t hear their words from Block C, but it would not have surprised me if it incorporated expletives which would have shocked both a sewer worker from the Gorbals and a fishwife from Billingsgate. It was all too much for Zack Brooks, who steamed in to take the Bison D-man to task. He and Mitchell came together in a mildly physical confrontation. Alas they failed to find agreement, just as surely as Karl Marx and Mussolini would have struggled to reach a consensus. Meanwhile, without a referee’s whistle to halt the game, Gael “Force” Lubwele was up the other end scoring a goal. But this was chalked off, marked off, struck off, washed off, scrubbed off, rubbed out, wiped out, weeded out, crossed out, abolished, annulled, deleted, erased, cancelled, voided, eliminated and called “no”, not to mention purged, obliterated and expunged from the records or at least it would have been had it been recorded at all. If you need any further clarification ……….. it didn’t count. Why not? Because the officials, without formally stopping the game, were dealing with the Brooks/Mitchell incident. They condemned the two miscreants to go down the steps for the infringement “delay of game”. This was bizarre in the extreme as, as hitherto mentioned, the game had not been stopped so how could a game which was continuing be “delayed”? And if the game was continuing why was the Lubwele “goal” washed off? It made as much sense to me as …… something nonsensical.

Is this how you wash off a goal?

There were no further goals or incidents of note in the period and on 20:00 P1 ended.

 

P2 opened and on 22:41 Hallam Wilson was called for slashing. The dictionary defines “slashing” as “to cut with a violent sweeping stroke or by striking violently and at random, as with a knife or sword”. There was nothing random about the slash perpetrated by Hallam and thankfully no knife or sword was involved, but it certainly was a sweeping stroke struck violently. Hallam was thrown in the can, sent to the slammer and clapped in irons all at once.

 

The resultant power play bore fruit for the Knights. A neat move between Brown from Witkowski ended with Mac Howlett clapping the puck into the top corner of the net. Had the net possessed as little stopping power as Ena Sharples’s hair net (that’s the beautiful Ena below), the puck would have passed straight through and been on its way to Leeds. But the Planet Ice nets are made of sterner stuff. 1-3 Knights.

 

On 32:50 Alex “Mittens” Mettam, playing his last game, took to the ice to replace Lawday. The explosion of noise which greeted Jasprit Banerjee when he threw a keema nan for a world record 37.5 meters at the Chittergong Chapati Chucking Championships in 2019 was nothing compared to the noise which burst forth from the Bison blocks to greet Metts. It would have been heard by a deaf man.

 

With the period winding down Bison put themselves right back in contention in the tie with a second goal to reduce the aggregate deficit to only 10 goals. It was a power play goal with 3 men in the box – Zack Brooks, Paul Petts and Jordan Griffin. Set up by Zack Milton, Lubwele brought his twig down and fired the biscuit goalwards. We heard a clunk as rubber hit metal and the puck deflected down off the bar conveniently to the Edgars Landsbergs quadruplets. One of them fired in. 2-3 Bison. The reduction of the Knights’ aggregate lead to only 10 goals may have seemed like a disaster of equal proportions to the Great Fire of London (1666) to some glass half empty Knights’ fans, but the glass half full fans were not worried. Nevertheless it was 2-3 Knights and Bison were back in the game if not the tie.

 

P2 ended and P3 opened. There was a solitary score in the period. This occurred on 43:49 and it was a peach of a shot. Witkowski from behind the goal line worked his way out front and flicked a backhander past Metts. Jumping Jehosophat on a pogo stick. 2-4 Leeds and, one has to concede, it was over as a contest.

 

The final buzzer sounded. The game and tie had been won by the Knights but the night belonged to Bison. The scenes at the end of the match are almost indescribable. The outpouring of support and love for the Bison was overwhelming. Even the Knights’ fans, who had joined in “The Great Escape” as the game wound down, were now singing “We love you Bison, we do”. What a bunch of truly sporting fans. The football type fans who have invaded our lovely game of hockey at certain rinks and on social media take note. This is how to behave. The Man in the Charlestown Chiefs Shirt turned to the Che Guevara impersonator and said he had never seen scenes like this. Che agreed. To a man (and woman) they poured out their support for the mighty Bison - the Man with 3 Ear rings, Honest Pete, the Bespectacled Youth, Duracell Man, Cake Lady, Mystic Jo, Teaboy, the Desperate Dan lookalike, Red Leader, Mrs Red Leader and many more. Although not there in body, I am sure the Howling Man and the Man from MI5 there in spirit. Those who had followed Bison well perhaps not to the end of the Earth, but certainly to the frozen wastes of the North and indeed some to Scotland (eh Red Leader?) and every Monday cleared the Basingstoke chemists of throat gargle to soothe their red raw larynx after a weekend of raucously urging the team forward with imaginatively lyricised chants of “BISON! Clap clap clap. BISON!”, “Let me hear you say Bison. BISON,” and “LET’S GO BISON LET’S GO! Clap clap”, not to mention giving vent to their opinions on matters refereeing in a somewhat vociferous fashion (how we miss the Howling Man) gave it their all. We  remembered those great moments in recent Bison history. The 8-1 victory over the Cardiff Fire to clinch the league title in 2018 when we outnumbered the home fans by 5 to 1 and the Cardiff ice was awash with Champagne at the end. That Aaron “Billy” Connolly empty netter to clinch a 5-3 win over the Manchester Phoenix in the playoff final in Coventry in 2014. That redirect goal from Andy “Machine Gun” Melachrino to clinch the EFL Cup against MKL in 2014. And we remembered the great players of the recent past who graced the ice in Bison colours - Tony “Tosh” Redmond, Cuddly Joe Greener, Marvellous Miroslav Vantroba, Lauko and Kubenko, the Slovak snipers, Kurt “The Scissors” Reynolds, Grandmaster Tomas Karpov, Lumberjack Joe Rand, Stonewall Stevie Lyle, Long Ciaron Long to name but a few. Add to that list the name of Alex “Mittens” Mettam, who Bavy announced would have a banner on the wall when (or is it if?) the rink reopens.

 

Back in 1992 Whitney Houston sang “and I eeee I will always love you ooo I” Hey guess what? Bison we will always love you.