Love, war, work and ice hockey

I’ve never made a secret in this blog of having another sporting love apart from ice hockey – football. I grew up in Sunderland-supporting territory so it was only natural that they’d become my team of choice. We’ve been through thick and thin together, me and Sunderland – promotion, relegation, 15 point humiliation, sacked managers, golden boot legends, a new stadium, derby games, Roy Keane...and for one mental season I had a season ticket despite living 200 miles away, working full time and studying for a professional marketing qualification – all at the same time. Highs that would give you a nosebleed and lows that literally made me swear I’d never set foot in the stadium again (about a fortnight before I bought that season ticket).

So it’s been a long and very full-on relationship. But I have been unfaithful. I’ve been sneaking out on a Saturday night, to see my new love. There have even been times when I’ve missed the second half of a Sunderland game because I’d arranged an assignation. That’s when it got kind of difficult to hide my fling. But it wasn’t just a fling any more – soon after we started seeing each other, just over a year ago, it was like flicking a switch – on Saturday nights I couldn’t wait to get down to the rink for the game.

I came clean about my relationship with ice hockey, and it became an ‘open relationship’ between me, football and hockey. My friends and family have to put up with the fact that Saturday nights are reserved for going to the rink, and social appointments are rarely booked without me checking Lightning’s fixture list first. And as my friends will testify I’m as likely to blather on about how the weekend’s hockey as I am about football or F1 these days. My replica shirt is now a Lightning one, not a Sunderland one.

Football got too far up its own backside...a “working class game” where players are paid more in a week than most people get in a year, their every move is captured in celeb magazines as much as for the sports pages, players publicly slag off supporters who spend a fortune following them, and you can have an English club without a single Englishman on the pitch, and an England team without an English manager.

In contrast, you don’t need a second mortgage to buy a match ticket for ice hockey, budgets are capped, supporters help pay players’ salaries, the number of foreign players is limited, and the game in general gets so little media coverage that you could pass players in the street and not even know it (although I did see Nick Poole in M&S last summer remembered quite quickly where I’d seen him before...even without all the padding and helmet!) And hockey arguably does more to get close to its supporters – ‘Meet the Players’ pre-season and the end of season awards dinner where supporters and players mix, as they do in the bar after games – how often does THAT happen in football?

One of my longest-standing friends told me recently, “You’re married to football – ice hockey is just a passing flirtation”. Sorry Drew – wrong. In mid-December, football and I decided on a separation. It’s amicable though and we’ll still see each other for a catch-up occasionally. What prompted the move was my relationship with Lightning taking a step forward. Whilst I’m a relative newcomer to ice hockey, I’ve been involved in marketing for a long time. A recent headline in one of the local free papers made me see red; for a sport where the number of bums on seats is crucial in relation to the income available for team development and even survival, a negative headline can be downright damaging to the club’s profile. I’d been mulling it over for a while then got in touch with the club and offered to help. My day job involves marketing and PR for an industrial manufacturer – while it pays for shoes and handbags and I enjoy working out what makes people buy, the subject matter’s not what you’d call exciting...at least if I can apply the same skills to promoting Lightning and their image I’ll be dealing with a subject I love!!

When the confirmation came that I was on the team, the work started immediately – Nick challenged me to get a press release out previewing that weekend’s game against Phoenix. Big game, big challenge – but after a lot of research, wondering how many Christmassy clichés I could reasonably include, and a late night at my laptop it was done, approved, sent out to local media two days before the game and up onto the club website (thankyou Mary and Karen!)

On the lunchtime of that match, I sat in the hairdressers hearing how the Manchester area had been deluged with snow overnight, and tapped some text for a ‘game cancelled’ press release into my iphone to email the club for approval, in case Phoenix didn’t get to us for whatever reason. The Met Office said the MK area would only get snow flurries from the edge of a snow belt that would trouble the M4 corridor far more - but better to have a statement ready and not needed, than need it and not have one. It turned out to be time well spent as six inches of snow was subsequently dumped on MK in five hours and the game was called off. (There was, however, a ‘virtual’ game on the MKIH forum where Lightning beat the Mancs by about 9 million goals, Pucky scored three hat-tricks from the crow’s nest and Smults had to wrestle Dubbsie out of the zamboni after running over Joy Tottman).

So my first few days on the MKL team was a bit ‘tales of the unexpected’, but as the saying goes, if you love what you do, you never have to ‘work’ again and I’m looking forward to more! Admittedly as someone who was recently stressing because I couldn’t understand some of the rules, I’ve got a lot to learn in a very short time – it’s going to be a rollercoaster, but Let’s Go Lightning!!

Past (and present) imperfect

I’ve not made a secret of the fact that I’m a relative newcomer to watching the beautiful game of ice hockey – and my pen name kind of gives that away. My other half and son have been watching hockey in MK since the Kings days, our boy getting into it in an even bigger way when he saw some games in Austria. I still can’t explain why I was the only one of the three of us who never got into it, but since I fell in love with the game last season I’m regretting not doing it sooner. I’d love to have seen the birth and rise of Lightning to the stage they’re at today. I’d love to have the knowledge you get from years of watching the game. But I know I can’t turn back the clock, all I can do is keep watching and learning, and lean on the experience of those who DO have the knowledge already.

In some ways I don’t help myself. While I’m nowhere near blind as a bat and can survive without them, I can see much better with my contact lenses, especially at distances (like from one side of an ice rink to the other......) But for last Saturday’s game against the Wildcats I totally forgot them after a mad dash from an afternoon out with the girls and our friends Mr Pinot and Mr Grigio. It just meant that action and players at the far end of the rink were a bit fuzzy...and I’m not just talking about Monir’s stubble.

On the way into the rink I bought my copy of Topshelf from Clive, who issued me with a challenge: my next column (ie this one) should include an assessment of the ref, Blaine Evans. Now me doing an assessment of any ref would always be one hell of a challenge, mostly because I struggle to spot a lot of infringements and twig what any given penalty or stoppage was actually for, let alone whether or not it was a fair call. And that was the cause of most of my frustration on Saturday: partly because of the fuzzy vision and partly because I’m still getting to grips with the game and rules, I still couldn’t understand some of the stoppages or just didn’t see them. I know why Muzzy and Foord ended up in the penalty box but didn’t catch who started it, or if there’d been any niggling before – if you’re trying to follow the action where the puck is, how do you keep an eye on off-puck niggling as well? Assessment of the ref? Not a cat in hell’s chance!! (Although I now know there was more to it than just the 'challenge' as some peeps had had a sweepstake on how late the game would finish - it seems our ref that night has a reputation for not exactly allowing a game to flow.....)

By the final period what was really bugging me was some of the rules. Yes I’m a girl but I do understand the hockey offside rule (if they’d stop tweaking the football equivalent, I might stand a chance). And I just about understand icing – even though apparently it doesn’t apply when your team is short-handed. Or if certain other players touch the puck at some point. Or if there’s an ‘e’ in that day of the week and/or a new moon. Actually I thought I understood it the other week until those “icing infringements” were given out. I’m told it was something to do with one of the linesmen saying it wasn’t icing so line changes were started, then the ref said it WAS icing and spotted the line change, so applied penalties. In which case why didn’t the ref confer with the lino?

But where I really got confused were a couple of incidents in particular. One was when Muzzy headed to the penalty box, proud owner of a 2+2 after his spat with Foord, followed shortly afterwards by Jamo for high sticks. But when I counted shortly afterwards, we had four players icing, rather than the three I’d expected, and the penalty count-downs I’d expected to see on the scoreboard weren’t there. How on earth’s a newcomer supposed to understand it when, on the face of it, the rules certainly look like they’re applied fairly randomly?!

The other strange thing was when it looked to me like Mettsy was being taken off, so I expected Barry to go on. Wrong!! Apparently (stop me if I’m wrong) it’s because the oppo have made an infringement but Lightning were in possession – the oppo wouldn’t touch the puck because the ref would blow for a delayed penalty, so Lightning took advantage by swapping our nettie for another player. Is that right? Or has my mind totally mangled that? Surely the oppo weren’t going to back off completely for long enough for that player change to (a) be considered, (b) happen, and (c) make a difference? (Haha, Nick, Smults and Carrsy with their coaching and skipper's experience have precisely nothing to fear from me and my tactical knowledge!!)

I probably drove both my other half and the boy mad with all my questions, particularly in the third period (Andy can’t have been THAT mad at me, he just started laughing at me at one point...) Hubs said even though he’s been watching since the Kings days, even he doesn’t understand some of the rules, he just enjoys the game for what he DOES understand and doesn’t worry about the rest of it. And talking on Saturday to someone very closely involved with the club, even HE said he doesn’t understand some of the game! So maybe there’s hope for me yet. Trouble is, my usual way of doing things - and what I do at work (another male-dominated, very technical environment) is to get ‘under the skin’ of what I’m learning about and try to understand as much as I can. So it’d be really frustrating to just accept that there are some rules I don’t understand, ignore them and enjoy the game ‘for what it is’.

But back to what actually happened in the game (technicalities aside – if you want proper match reports written by people who know what they’re talking about, see the MK Citizen or Topshelf fanzine – just finish reading this bit first!) Grant wasn’t icing but looked quite happy and animated on the bench. And unless it’s my fuzzy eyesight, he’s starting to remind me of Matt Bellamy from Muse. Swindon scored first (boo!), Britts equalised then Farny got us ahead with his first goal of the season (yay!) The second period seemed to go a bit scrappy, neither side seeming to want to put their foot down and pull away – everyone woke up when Muzzy and Foord dropped the gloves for the best scrap we’ve seen in a little while – Tony Sargeant took some brilliant photos which will hopefully be on the team website soon (technology issues afoot, apparently). Carrsy got two goals in three minutes in the last period, one of Lukas’s many shots from the blue line finally went in, and Monir scored as well, to make it 6-2.

Sunday afternoon and the lads took a trip up the A1 to Peat Bog Horror. Unnoticed by me at least, Gary Clarke retired injured late in the game on Saturday and managed only 10 minutes of the warm up on Sunday before conceding defeat to his injury. I didn’t make it to the game but the fact that the final score was only 2-1 in Potty’s favour suggests to me at least that whilst Lightning couldn’t take the points, they didn’t exactly lie down and make it easy for Morgs and Co. A big disappointment for the lads to lose to our local rivals but it wasn’t a rout by any means. Every cloud...etc etc.

Remember it's a back-to-front schedule at the Thunderdome this week, and fingers crossed for another home win to rattle Randall and the Bees! They put up more of a fight than we were expecting last time they visited, so hopefully the lads can stuff 'em good and proper this time. Let's go, Lightning!!