Penalties and Standing Water - Five things from w/e 28 August

So it's the day after the night before, and on reflection what did we learn from the hockey week and the home game against HV71?

1 SHL teams rock - In the CHL our league has now played eight and lost eight against the Swedish elite, which isn't a surprise given their budgets and the number of early round draft picks they supply and then ice. A 5:3 and 5:2 series loss is better than most pundits were predicting. T'was also great to see Dowdy on the scoresheet against the best in Europe.

2 Penalties - Everyone knows that we had to change our normal style of hockey to adapt to the European style of refereeing, so it's frustrating that the players kept giving the stripes opportunities to penalise us. You've no doubt seen the stats but HV71 gained nine of their ten goals with the player advantage, whilst when we were even strength we 'won' 4:1! Nuff said.

3 Puddles - It wasn't just the players losing their cool, as the fans were sweltering at a very toasty Arena too. Might have been a very cool home team tactic to play in standing water, but the 'ice' was as shocking as I've seen, and it certainly slowed down the breakaway game.

4 Away fans - The CHL gave another orchestrated block of awesome away fan ultras the chance to visit the library - just like sektion84 last year. Their travelling fans seem more vocal and youthful than we're used to, and it's great to see them here - would be great if we could get a dedicated block singing and dancing where everyone could see them.

5 Worst record in CHL - Sorry to report, but as we've now got a -12 goal difference, and the next worst is -10 from the Poles (who only lost to Sparta by one goal) we go bottom of the CHL rankings for the second year running. We could do with a result at the next game.

One final thought to leave you with is to encourage you to listen to the Breaking the Ice podcast on iTunes - go listen to Alan and Mark, and give them some feedback if you agree or disagree with anything they are saying.

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