Wicket fence

Another dreadful loss on the cricket this morning. This is the best wicket I saw.

Thankfully the day improved from thereon in.

The sun was shining so, a while spent outside washing one of the cars. Then on to trying to fox a problem with the network connection in Jonathan's room and remaking a patch cable for Jamie's room. The latter a complete success - the first attempt had one set of connectors a mm short in the plug when I crimped it. Second attempt worked once I realised what I'd done first time around. Jonathan's room was proving a little more intractable.

For the techies out there….

I started with nothing working, but replacing a cable into the switch upstairs partially sorted the problem. Am currently only getting 10MBit/s connection into a 100BaseT switch in his room. It worked at 1000BaseT when I first installed it. Must be a problem on conductors 3 or 6 as 4 and 5 must be ok.. At least I know where to look, but I ran out of time.

We went into Coventry and picked Jamie up, went for a late lunch to celebrate Gail's birthday tomorrow, and then on to watch the Coventry Blaze play Nottingham Panthers at the Skydome.

We were beginning to think it was going to be another loss (although they managed a win against Cardiff yesterday) when they went one down in the first period. But, the team came out fighting in the second and went two up. One was a penalty shot about which there was lots of discussion and uncertainty as to whether or not the resulting goal would stand. Thankfully, it did.

It seems that the goal was moved off it's mounts (which is why the penalty was awarded in the first place) during the penalty shot by Ryan Ginand. Ryan also seemed to the play the puck behind him as he did a wonderful loop to pass the puck into the goal from behind him giving the impression that the puck went backwards - not allowed on a penalty shot. The fact is that he is so fast and nimble on his skates, he managed to skate around in front of the puck and place it into the net from behind him while it was still moving forwards. The panther's net minder got mightily upset, but the goal being dislodged on a penalty stroke is not grounds for disallowing the goal, and Ryan simply outplayed him. He tipped the goal over in frustration. When Ryan pick up the puck, a buzz goes around the crowd.

The panther's GM made a second error 90 seconds from the end. The Blaze were on a power play (Panthers had one man in the penalty box due to an infringement) but while panthers were at the Blaze end, their goal minder raced off the ice, freeing a man so that another attacker could come on instead. Unfortunately, the Blaze got the puck and raced forwards to score and empty net goal. 3:1. Another win.

It's the best we've seen them play for a while.
Ice hockey is a fantastic fast and skilful game. The players make footballers look like wimps with their cheating and feigned injuries. It's not that I dislike football, I love it, but ice hockey is well worth a watch, fast, skilful, tactical, brutal even. Watch some at the forthcoming Winter Olympics and get a taste.