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!!