Game Day - Wheelers (7) d Rockers (3)

On Saturday, May 17, we played the Rockers in the second round of the North Vikings Inline Hockey Club's Division 2 Winter League.  We were the second last game of the day, starting at 8pm.  I brought up Lizard King with me from Adelaide, he brought his ipad for a bit of video action.  We got there about 7pm.  The Rockers were our opponents in the Grand Final last season.  They'd lost four of that team to First Division teams, we lost two to Division One (the Dylans) and one (Mal) to another Div 2 team.  It was going to be interesting to see how the teams had panned out.  It turned out to be a reasonably comfortable win for us, though it got a bit stressful at times. 

We opened the scoring with two quick goals off of Alex's stick (he ended up with four on the night).  Then, they struck back with two fairly quick replies, both off of errors in our (my) game.  In the first, I was screwing around in offence for way too long making my mind up what to do.  When I finally tracked behind their goal I was still uncertain in my moves.  Unsurprisingly, their largest player had time to track and dispossess me before skating it up to our zone where he slotted a nice shot.  Not long after, I was involved in their second goal when I went down in front of our net and ended up blocking shots (3 by my count) while on the floor before letting through the fourth.  I had managed to screen our goalie, so it went in.  Not to be put off, we blitzed a number of shots, before I ended up scavenging a loose puck during a scramble in the slot and snapping it into the exposed far corner of the net.  We went in to half time with a 3-2 lead.

First Half Highlights

The second half was more lop sided, with their only goal coming off a goalie brainfade on Matt's part, and we slamming home four more.  I got the last goal of the night from an unassisted skate up the right wing (chipping it off the boards to get me started out of defence) and a slow cruise across the goal front until the goalie had lost his balance tracking me.

No penalties against either side.  We generally kept a defence in place and played a passing game for probably three quarters of the match.  Our line management was pretty good, everyone having roughly equal time and no one totally blown at the end.  I got two goals, no assists.  I had about four unsuccessful shots, none from close in.  Was on the rink for one other of our goals in addition to those I put in the net.  We were quite pleased with the effort and look forward to playing the Shufflers next week in a top of the table clash.

GP 2 - G 3 - A 3 - TP 5 -  2/0/0 - +3