Grand Final Game Day - At the Rink

This is the first of three posts about the Grand Final game, inline Winter Season 2014.   For the other posts see here and here.

The day was a blue sky sunny 20'C with a mild fresh breeze.  After my morning skate (see previous post) I packed my bag and caught a taxi to Wayne's, chatting sport and world affairs with my indian taxi driver who has made Australia home.  From Wayne's, me and Shaun piled into Shaun's old car and headed up the expressway to Gawler.  There, we dropped my gear at the rink and then went and dropped his car off at his home.  We returned to the rink by taking a nice twenty minute stroll along the river.  I was in a good frame of being as I organised myself and kitted up.

My pre-game warmup was a bit different from usual.  The first part, a bit of general skating in the gallery or outside while one waits for the previous game to finish, had evolved from last time.  Then, I had uncertainly put myself through the various basic skating maneuvers, trying to make sure that my body would remember how to do them.  Then, a couple minutes on the rink with the team, taking turns at shots on goal to warm up the Matt the Goalie.  On this occasion, however, both of these elements changed (another topic for a separate post - the pre game warm up).

This time, I did practically no skating before entering rink.  I was mildly warmed up by my walk, and my muscle memory had been activated by my morning skate.  So, once my equipment was comfortable it was out onto the rink - possible only because the format on Grand Final Day allowed for longer times between games and thus a longer period available for the teams to go through their warm up on the rink.

We had a total of about seven minutes available to us.  For whatever reason, Matt the Goalie left the rink so we couldn't revert to usual practice of shots at goal.  Matt the skater and I were the only ones out there for much of the time, so we just passed pucks between ourselves at a fairly high rate.  Probably got more puck time than either of us had had with a team mate except for in a game!  For the last minute, all five Wheelers skaters were out there getting into the rhythm in an improvised horseshoe passing game.  I thought it was valuable time.