Diary of a Tall Girl

I’ve had a weekend of feverish inspiration so I will be bringing you not one, but two blog posts this week, in quick succession. It’s been a week of massive ups and downs for the Vipers and I’m struggling to make sense of it all to be honest, so can we go through it together, step by step, in a nice calm, structured fashion, please? Thank you! I will deal with the not insignificant matter of the hockey matches first. And move onto OTHER things in post number 2. Let’s just take it day by day…

Friday 7th January, 2011

Dear Diary. On Friday night, I watched live Elite League Hockey action from the comfort of my own sofa. It was fun! There were some fights and Belfast Giants won but it was very close. I like watching hockey in my house. Love, Katy xx

Saturday 8th

Dear Diary. On Saturday I went to a real live hockey match!

Engage reporter mode.

The first of the weekend’s matches was a massive home tie against fellow strugglers the Edinburgh Capitals. I feel like I wrote that exact same sentence when we played them last, back in November, and not much has changed since then, except that the situation on and off the ice has possibly gotten even grimmer, for both clubs. Both missing a number of imports, this was billed as a ‘four point match’ (that’s a six-pointer, to us football fans!) and there was no denying that it really was a key game, for a number of reasons. And the Vipers rose to the challenge with style. In a fairly calm and collected first period, we took a two goal lead, both goals coming from the stick of Jaro ‘Ninja’ Rzeszutko (I’m determined for that nickname to catch on!). We added to the lead almost immediately at the start of the second, and although Edinburgh pulled one back shortly afterwards, it was a dominant display from the Vipers, controlled and disciplined; they worked their systems to great effect, taking advantage of a number of powerplay opportunities offered up by a series of Capitals penalty offences, including most notably the ejection of netminder Scott Reid from the game for misconduct after an incident involving Sam Zajac, and then a linesman getting a bit of abuse. Tut, and all that.

We scored lots of goals after that. Which is always nice. Mike Prpich picked up a goal and five assists, Danny Stewart let rip one of his trademark stinging slapshots, and in the third period Jaro the Ninja completed his hat-trick, and to bring up double figures in the dying seconds, Sammy Zajac scored his first ever Vipers goal, and the place erupted. Our second double-figured result in as many months, the victory was soured somewhat by the dire financial straits our opponents find themselves in; it felt a bit like kicking a puppy. But at the end of the day, a win is a win (apologies for the state-the-bleeding-obvious sporting clichés there).

In a new feature, Vipers management invited fans to vote for their Man of the Match via text, which was novel and also highly amusing; you could almost feel the collective befuddlement ripple around the rink as people tried to spell Rzeszutko, before most probably just texting ‘Jaro’ or ‘14’, or a different player altogether (which wouldn’t have helped as Mike Prpich was arguably the next best player!). I'm proud to say I definitely spelt it right, although it’s purely because of this blog and the number of times I’ve had to look it up in the past! All those unnecessary ‘z’s! His family are obviously keen Scrabble-players. When they came to announce the award, I wouldn’t have been completely shocked to find Ant and Dec leaping out from behind a bush and in a few drawn-out moments of nervous tension listing the team members in true ‘I’m a Celebrity…’ style; ‘Such-and-such… it’s not you. Sam Zajac… it might be you.’ It was a nice touch, with the correct outcome, in my humble opinion.

Sunday 9th

Just when you think things can’t get any worse, in terms of our team and how many of them there are, they do. As for the grim reality of the departure of Dale Mahovsky, well, as the angry headmaster said to the naughty child ‘I’ll deal with you later’. It warrants its own blog post, I’ll tell you that much. I reached a point where I was almost glad I would be missing next weekend’s matches (due to a girlie trip to France); I felt sort of like hockey and I were lovers who had had our first tiff, and needed sometime apart.

The match away at Coventry on Sunday night looked certain to be a write-off from a Vipers point of view; we were down to eight imports, just 11 skaters altogether, and I followed the general Twitter feeds from Blaze fans half-heartedly, expecting a rout. But somehow we did the unthinkable, putting on our game faces and pulling a 5-1 lead out of the bag by the end of the second period. I was feeling less gloomy now. Despite the news that John Schwarz had been hit in the face with a puck. The poor guy really does take a battering. On the plus side, I have a candidate to replace Mahovsky in my clucky mother hen phases. We made hard work of it in the third period (what a shock), but after many weeks of trial and error we finally came up with a solution to the scientific theory we’ve apparently been testing all season: the optimum lead required to render a third period collapse meaningless, is in fact, four goals. Ah so that’s what’s been going on. Someone tell science we’ve reached a conclusion, and we can stop doing that particular brand of collapsing now, alright?

John Schwarz: Would you hit this face? Me neither. The other teams apparently didn't get the memo.

And so our triumph in Coventry (we’re getting really good on the road!) made it a four-point weekend – I’ve never experienced one of those before! I could definitely get used to it. Danny’s Dozen have now become the Unstoppable Eleven, and it’s all come down to a nice symmetry. 2011. The four point match. A four point weekend. The Unstoppable 11. A spritely skip up to 8th place in the league, and into the play-off positions. And how it makes my heart proud.

Monday 10th

Um, nothing hockey-related happened on Monday. But I’m just trying to be thorough here! Well I say nothing; there was a meeting between the people in the power at Vipers and the Elite League to (hopefully) agree a way forward for the club. But nobody told us anything about it on Monday, so I was forced to turn to a bucket of wine in order to get through the evening.

Tuesday 11th

They gave us some money! Thank the almighty gods of hockey, we will make it to the end of the season. That is the best news I’ve had all year. I haven’t had much news so far this year, to be honest, what with it only being the 11th and all, but it’s still the best.

So that concludes part one of the weekend’s action. The silver lining, if you will. Join me tomorrow for the dark side, a sombre recollection of my grief-stricken Sunday at the hands of Dale ‘the Splitter’ Mahovsky. Come, laugh at my misery. It will be jolly fun. See you shortly…