What a difference a week makes !
Last Sunday we saw a fired up, passionate, intense Phantoms who were good enough to beat the best team in the league. Tonight, just six days later, we saw a dull, lacklustre, flat Phantoms that had one new convert to Phantoms hockey suggesting to his kids in the second period break, “maybe they all have flu !”.
There was a point in the first period when despite looking far from convincing, fans were daring to dream. Phantoms had opened up a 3-0 lead and a string of penalties on the visitors set up not one but two 5on3 powerplays but rather than grabbing the opportunity to unleash terror on the Streatham goal, Phantoms let them off the hook by constantly cycling the puck around the zone in what appeared to be a game of ‘see how many passes we can make before shooting’ ….. the visitors couldn’t have believed their good fortune !
3-0 by 10:59 turned out to be as good as it got. From that point forward, Phantoms lost the game 3-4 and at one point looked likely to hand Bison the title without them needing to concern themselves with a trip to Wales. As it turned out, a 10-1 win for Bison would probably have rendered any scoreline at Bretton irrelevant but that shouldn’t be used as an excuse for what was an inexcusably poor performance from players and coaches in front of a large and expectant home crowd.
In midweek, Phantoms coach proclaimed that they would approach tonight’s game no differently to a regular league game and, to his credit, that is exactly what we saw. What he didn’t seem to realise was that most of our regular league game performances this season have been equally lacklustre and dull so why set your stall out to achieve the same sort of unconvincing results when the priority tonight was to rack up a huge goal tally ?
The proclamation that we would approach tonight’s game “with no special plan” was simply bizarre. This was a special game, requiring a special and quite unique achievement which in turn needed a special plan. Tonight was all about a Plan B …… tonight was all about thinking outside the box …… tonight was about overwhelming the limited opposition with a performance that would have simply overpowered them.
What we got was a ‘business as usual’ performance that started flat, ended flat and was less than flat in the middle and the question left on the lips of many fans was …… why ?
With three trophies now down and heading elsewhere, attention turns to the play-offs and we can only pray that the coach doesn’t feel the play-offs require “no special plan” because, for certain, they will need a whole lot more of a plan than we were witness to tonight !
Game stats HERE
Footnote: I make it a self discipline to write these reports without looking at the views of others first in order to stay honest but it can backfire when you find out that many of the team actually WERE suffering from flu so I’ll stay with my opinion on the game but maybe there is now an answer to the question “why ?” !!!