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"leftright":29n10i6h wrote:Yep none other than me. Do you know someone else who plays both sides?
Regards leftright
[/quote:29n10i6h]So. Many. Things. Could. Say. Restrain. Polite. Ends.
Yeah, it was turning into a flood for a while there yesterday. I came home from being out for the evening and there’d been postings in about 10 topics.
What, you have to run from the rink to the nearest fast food place, with Bode on your tail?
Bode’s pretty good on blades. I reckon she’d knock you down way before you got near any stinkin’ half cooked chicken.
A walking advertisement for Chemistry graduates if ever I saw one <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink.gif" alt="
” title=”Wink” />"Azzy77":3ktvydco wrote:The only thing is, I don’t care if Patrick Roy turns up to Prems practise I don’t like rotating, its nothing personal, and I am sure you understand,
but we probably should be able to work something out.
[/quote:3ktvydco]There’s plenty of goals there Aaron, they can always bring a third one on and squish you all in.
I was wondering the other day about how goalies find team practises where often their role is just to stand in front of the goal and get shot at. I’m not sure what Jenel is doing, but often practices that I’ve seen previously don’t seem to give much training to goalies.
Made me wonder if the southern region should put some thought into a ‘goalie camp’ and focusing some coaching resources on time on specific things that goalies might need training for. There is a school of thought around that goalies are rather important to the team, though the Ducks are working to disprove this theory.
"Joe":3ktvydco wrote:I blame the Ducks defense for the low numbers of shots on net. Sometimes I have to take extreme measures just make sure our guest goalies stay awake during games. Know what I mean? I’m not coughing up that puck in the slot due to lack of skill — I had your interest in mind. And I agree, 2 goalies are enough for the prem practices.Are you traveling to Gore with us? Do you like long walks in the rain too?
[/quote:3ktvydco]That’s not extreme. Simon Christos took a shot on Aaron during the Easton Cup. Aaron wasn’t fully awake either, it took him a second to move and stop it.
Warm ups before the game? Meh, why bother when you can do it _during_ the game.
The Dunedin League is really short of A grade goalies – this is the grade that our Prem goalies play in. We’ve been covering four teams this year with only three goalies, since the Juniors goalie got a job on Tuesday nights and left a team short. We’ve had a couple of good goalies leave in the past couple of years.
That competition finishes in 8 days, but it should run again later this year – I’m hoping someone will jump forward to get the A grade up and running come July after uni holidays.
And the beasts already have two goalies, but the Ducks could sure do with one in the SIHL. We’ve played 5 games so far this year without, and one game with. 5-1 record though, which isn’t too bad. Aaron’s right, sometimes we keep the shots right down, but we had a good tournament against Alex the other week.
I was going to ask how come you played for a Canterbury team in the Easton Cup, but are playing Stampede. I guess that answers the question.
There are sure to be some pick up games in the next while to get you on the ice. Auckland Uni are bringing down an SNC A team in late June for a couple of games which we haven’t sorted teams yet for.
Hey Pat, good on you for putting some thought into it and asking around. There’s some good ones there, and as your smilies note, some shockers!
Aces is taken. The Dunedin Inline Hockey Club is called the Aces. They’re in hibernation at the moment, but they’d (ie me!) get annoyed if the Ice Hockey club took the name.
I always liked ‘heat’ as a hockey team name. Apart from the fact that it contradicts the whole cold ice thing, I like the imagery behind it – speed in skating and shooting, hot on attack, putting the heat on the other team etc.
Their full roster is here Joe: http://www.nzicehockey.co.nz/NatLeague/ … _Squad.htm might help you sort out who you have photos of.
He was on the ice a bunch, you’re guaranteed to have shots of him.
Here’s some:
[img:2ipld8u1]http://planb.smugmug.com/photos/156152491-M.jpg[/img:2ipld8u1]
I don’t think they teach that move in NZ, he must have learnt that in Italy <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink.gif" alt="” title=”Wink” />[img:2ipld8u1]http://planb.smugmug.com/photos/156467487-M.jpg[/img:2ipld8u1]
Presumably they’ll have them up here first:
Joe had a nice photo of the back of Stefan and Simon.
I don’t think you need a photo of all three. But they all should be mentioned.
To jump off the ice for a second, the NZ Inline Hockey team beat Hungary last night 9-8, at the world champs in Germany. That’s an upset, Hungary is ranked 10th, NZ is ranked 15th.
You can follow the team at http://www.inlinehockey-wcs.com/index.php?id=325&L=1. They play Brazil and Australia over the next couple of days, both of whom are ranked above them. The winner of the pool plays a qualification game to move into the top division of 8 teams.
Actually I took a couple of bits out, but added a couple of bits in. The whole thing got me… annoyed. With myself and with the Dunedin team. And writing it down is a good way to deal with it and find ways to fix it.
Clearly you haven’t been the recipients of one of my long thoughtful emails before Mark. I’ll try to round up some thoughts on the Beasts phenomenon and give you a couple of pages <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/wink.gif" alt="
” title=”Wink” />The front page – you’ve got congratulations to Stefan for representing Stampede. I think you should at the least mention Simon Christos and Ryan O’Keefe – who also represented Stampede – and Simon even got on the ice!
Here’s some of the bits of an email that I sent to Phil about yesterday (with some additions/modifications):
The juniors games were a lot more interesting. A fair few of the Dunedin players had been out the night before at the Kings formal, so some were hungover, and possibly still drunk. I gave Phil Bennett a 5 minute major. He’d come up after being checked in the first period pushing and looking for a scrap, and I’d spoken to their coach Joe and asked him to get his players to settle down. In the second period he came in and made a bad hit – high and with the stick up. He came up again looking for a scrap and I intervened and put my arms around him and dragged him off. He pushed me away and told me to ‘get off him’. So I went straight to a major for roughing with automatic game misconduct and sent him off. He came back to the bench (in street clothes) in the third period and so I spoke to his coach and got him out of there as well. Alexandra won that game 6-3. By the end of the game it was obvious that Dunedin were going to lose, so some of their players were just tracking Alexandra players trying to catch them in close proximity to having had the puck and hitting them. They weren’t focused on the hockey at all, they were just pissed off and looking to smash people.
The second game Dunedin had obviously been told to hit more and harder. Some of them weren’t playing the puck at all on defense, they were just checking the player. There were a lot of missed hits, and a lot of real smashes. Some of the Alex players were pretty small, and they got a hammering. We missed (or I didn’t see it, Graham says he did see it, but was happy it wasn’t from behind) a big check from behind right near the Dunedin goal, by a Dunedin player on an Alex player. After the game the coach told me that the Dunedin player said it had been from behind. By this stage I was trying to be really onto it and keep the game at a reasonable level, and I got Ryan O’Keefe for a minor check from behind – basically a big push – and when I put him in there he told me that the “fucking referee doesn’t know the rules” so I added a game misconduct to his minor and put him off the ice. I made a couple of other calls – interference (late checks), high checking, holding etc – all minors.
Blake suggested to me after the game that we should have been stronger in the first period, which in retrospect is a good suggestion. To quote Jerome, we let the canary go in the first period, and then were scrambling to get it back for the rest of the game. I feel unhappy about our refereeing of the 2nd game in particular, I’ll come back to that below.
I was really concerned during and after the games about the Dunedin players behaviour. Some of them played what I viewed to be entirely standard contact ice hockey – physical play, but still focused on the puck. Liam, Zanzee, Dougie etc – all been playing for a while and played well. Ryan and Phil were in my opinion both just thugs out there on the ice, and by the third period of the 2nd game alexandra players were trying to avoid getting the puck near them because they were just going to get smashed. They both seem to be young men with real anger, which backs up what a bunch of other people have said about them to me. They didn’t seem to have any hesitation about coming in high, late, from behind, etc, and their primary concern on defense didn’t seem to be getting the puck, it seemed to be hitting people.
I also wish that teams would take some responsibility for the actions of their players – just because referees miss a call, doesn’t mean that a coach or manager can’t sit a player down when he’s done something dangerous. I can understand being happy to get away with a hooking or a trip, but this was a big hit from behind from a player who gave me some strong impressions of not being mature enough to be out there to start with.
If that team develops into having 4 or 5 similar style players, I can’t imagine anyone is going to want to play them, and then when they go up to senior checking they’re going to find that thugs get smashed back by bigger thugs, and they’re not going to know how to play hockey any other way. Someone like Soper from Gore would make mincemeat out of them either in the contact or playing the actual puck. The whole game plan from the Dunedin team, implemented through four or five players, seemed to be to smash Alexandra so they didn’t want to get anywhere near the puck, and then win the game from there.
Alexandra were undoubtably very unhappy when they went home. I can’t imagine they’ll have anything great to say about the other team, or about the refereeing.
I talked to Joe about his team after the 2nd game. His response was – yes, call the high hits and illegal stuff, but I’m going to get my team to play the player and not the puck, and that this was the best way to play defense. I’m no expert on contact hockey, but I’d be keen to hear what Steve Jackson thinks about that attitude – he’s got some good thoughts on contact hockey and what sort of people it attracts. Joe also said that if other teams were going to send up small players then they’re going to get knocked around. I don’t agree with that attitude – another team will get into it and do like Dunedin did, and smash players that aren’t playing full on contact hits, like Zanzee, Dougie etc. It felt like it’s just going to evolve into a smashathon, and that’ll exclude players who aren’t physically able, or don’t want to play that sort of hockey.
Juniors is a grade that covers three years of ages, so having big hulking 18 year olds knocking over much smaller 15 year olds – we need to remember that we’re a small sport and if Alex sends up a team of 9 people, they haven’t picked their biggest and best, they’ve sent up all the juniors, and some will be small because the year before they were midgets. Just because you can smash over the opposition, doesn’t mean you should do so.
Anyway, I feel that for these Dunedin Juniors contact games, we need an experienced referee out there. I haven’t really played contact hockey, and I don’t feel confident enough to know exactly what’s a good hit and what isn’t. They’re away in Gore next weekend, and then at home on the 17th against Queenstown. Some don’t really know how to hit properly, so at the very least we need one referee out there who can say definitively.
It really was a somewhat unpleasant experience, but I’m very anti-aggression and violence, so that might just be my take on it, and others might have found it less so.
Mark’s suggestion about us getting some better ideas from Jenel about contact hits is another good one.
