For reasons which are complicated and also too dull to relate on a site as dedicated to thrills and entertainment as this one is (!), The Referee recently found himself at the Coliseum in Nassau, Long Island to witness the New York Islanders being hammered at home by the Ottawa Senators. The visitors from north of the border looked superior throughout, so much so that the Islanders were lucky to come second, as they say.
For those who have not already spotted it, I am of course talking about (ice) hockey. (Ice) hockey is known here and in Canada as "hockey", such that if one wants to refer to hockey, one has to say "field hockey". Luckily, I rarely want to refer to hockey, and therefore this additional requirement is not particularly onerous in my case.
I have nothing more to report about Islanders 2 Senators 5 that can't be derived from the score or the brief synopsis above. I do, however, want to relate some of the things I learnt about (ice) hockey that evening, a sport about which I had not previously thought or cared very much at all. Whilst not all, or indeed any, of these things might be accurate, they are at least heartfelt, and that ought to be more important.
And so, The Referee is proud to share with you, dear reader, his hard-researched 5 Things You Never Knew, And Still Don't, About (Ice) Hockey:
1. There are 250 players on each team, although each player is on the ice for an average of only about 10 seconds each. For some reason no one ever thought to build a door in the dug out, so substitutes have to fling themselves over a little wall, hoping to land on their skates rather than their rear ends.
2. All (ice) hockey players have elaborately broken noses. By this I mean that these are not common or garden broken noses, the sort of injury that could befall anyone. Oh no. These are noses so comprehensively and numerously broken that they appear to be marking out a new slalom route for the benefit of a passing downhill skier. How could I tell this from the stands?, you are wondering. Well, I was lucky enough to meet a legendary former Islander before the game. He had clearly once been a good-looking chap, before the slalom bulldozers had moved in.
3. All (ice) hockey players fight, all the time. Except in the game I saw, in which no one so much as raised a question about the masculinity of his opponents. Obviously, fighting is bad, and The Referee was not in the least disappointed not to witness any. Although this to some extent restricted his ability to research the full extent of the game of (ice) hockey for your benefit, gentle reader.
4. The following point might say more about the age and constitution of The Referee than it does about the nature of (ice) hockey, but for quite a proportion of the game I couldn't actually see the puck as it skimmed at high speed across the surface of the ice. It appeared that this was not a problem shared by most of the crowd, since there was a good deal of ooh-ing and aah-ing some seconds before your correspondent had worked out what was happening. Ho, hum.
5. All (ice) hockey players fight, all the time.
Just before his visit to the Nassau Coliseum, The Referee received the news that he was to be summoned to return to the Motherland, AKA the UK of Blighty, without further ado. Again, the reasons for this are much too dull for an entertainment-heavy organ such as this. Suffice to say that The Referee's US odyssey would soon be at an end.
As I left Long Island and contemplated an impending return to the green and pleasant hills of the Motherland, I allowed myself a small and appropriate celebration. "Jolly hockey sticks", I thought.
