Sunday night hockey

I described last week's Chieftain's game as "scrappy", I believe -- although the Chieftains won, and that was what counted, their game was disappointing. This week the inevitable happened, and they lost.

The Milton Keynes Lightning had with them a vociferous army of supporters, banging their drums and dancing. Yes, dancing. It was that level of depravity.
The first period appeared to be passing again without score -- until the Lightning struck with two goals in relatively quick succession.

The Chieftains went into the second period on the back foot, but we tried to remain optimistic -- "It will just make their crushing defeat more humiliating" I said, and Jon reminded us of a game a few weeks back that started slowly, then saw the Chieftains fight back from a disadvantage to winning with a handsome margin.

Then in the opening minutes of the second period the Lightning scored again.
3 - 0 was not insurmountable. If any further goals could be prevented, a humiliating home defeat could be avoided.

It looked good, it really did. Further attacks were fought off, and the Chieftains seem to play well when you put the screws on them. Before long, instead of trailing 3 - 0, the Chieftains had closed the gap to just 3 - 2.

But there it stayed. There were penalties and sustained attacks on the goal, but the Chieftains just didn't get it together enough. The buzzer sounded, and before the drums of the Lightning had even faded we were leaving in disgust. There's always next week.