Glass half-full - Five things I learnt w/e 20 Nov

Like many others I went into the weekend hoping for four points, but telling myself that two would be fine. Now I’m on this side of the weekend I’m not so sure – and we're left with a bizarre case of winning the one we could have lost, and losing the one we should have won. Anyway,  here’s another five things I took away from those games.

1. Fretter's first Friday goal – Haven’t seen the replays but in my mind Desi turned over the puck in our zone, knocked it past their retreating Defence a couple of times, then lunged for a diving poke pass to a streaking Frets, who buried the biscuit on the break. Bravo - We can continue to re-live that goal until a better one turns up.
2. The second Fretter goal – The puck never left the end of Colton’s stick as he drove past three Devils spectators as from the side-boards to the blue-paint, where he deked past Ben Bowns for that beauty of a second. The best goal at the arena since his last one, sublime, and those two efforts deserved a better reward in terms of points return.
3. Anders & Davey– I wish I had more confidence in these two. I appreciate that it’s a team game, and others needs to help out, but weak play by Anders, and an enormous howler from Davey (instantly winning Hitchy’s ‘Mark Thomas Award’ for his outstanding contribution to the opposition) cost us points again. I can accept that from a British bottom two defenceman, but from an ECHL calibre import – no thanks.
4. Chuck the puck at the net – All four Devils goals were scored from close in - a couple of re-bounds, a dodgy bounce off the back-boards, and the one Davey wants to forget. We need a couple of those bounces at their end, and the less we cycle it around, and the more the puck gets sent to the net, the more chances we have. It worked on Sunday, which makes Friday's shot-shy experience even harder to fathom.
5. The Rutherford incident - Firstly we're glad he's OK, and now our concern can turn to the fate of Yared who suffered a cowardly checking to the head from the aforementioned midget. I hope there's no lasting injury to Hagos, and Desi's penalty is removed from his record. Rutherford however should suffer the full force of the DOPS 'magic eight ball' and keep his fingers crossed for a ban shorter than the number of games Yared misses. Would also be nice if he, and the league-wide Twitter kangeroo court, made some apologies too.

One last thing to leave you with is that Tony Smith has made it clear that he wants more bums-on-seats, and that mean more excitement, and that means more goals. We set our table during recruitment when we seemed to spend big up-front, seek out attack minded D, and compromise at the back. That combined with Moose not being the saviour we hoped for, and increasingly playing feet out of his crease, then I guess that means that no lead is safe, and a break-out, or collapse is equally likely at the end of every game – it’s going to be a roller-coaster of scoring and/or giving up leads because I’m not expecting a policy change anytime soon.

Cheers,

Tony.

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