Efe

Koc Universitesi: 1
Istanbul Buz Kartallari: 15
(0-8, 0-4, 1-3)

If I were to pick a sentence to describe this game, it would be "so close, yet so far away"...

This was meant to be our week one game, but it was postponed due to the WJC in Istanbul. This was a much weaker team compared to the one we played last week, and it actually would've served us better to play this game first and shake some of the rust off and then play last week's game. We could've easily been 2-0 instead of 1-1 right now. Anyway, let's not dwell on that...


This is when we were getting our licenses checked. This guy next to me reminds me of Stephen Baldwin in Slapshot 2 :)

Another interesting detail. This game was scheduled to be played at 10 pm with two games before it (6 and 8 pm) when yet another game was moved from another location to the Istanbul rink and slotted in at 2 pm. I don't know who thinks 2 hours is a sensible amount of time between two hockey games but in the end we ended up on the ice just past midnight. I was sleeping in my equipment on the locker room floor waiting for the other game to finish. By the time I got in my car after the game (even though I skipped the shower) it was 3:45 am and I got to bed around 4:30 am. This game killed my Sunday and pretty much my weekend.


Warm-ups. Other goalie (in jeans and a jacket due to his 4-game suspension) is telling me to go take some shots before warming up. In exactly those words. That is my 'yeah right' look...

Apart from that it was a very easy game, I must've gotten a total of perhaps 15 shots. Most of the time I was just watching the game at the other end, trying not to drift away. Especially the first two periods were dead boring with perhaps 2-3 shots total.



I almost let in another stupid goal when my defender and a forward were chasing a puck and I came out to the faceoff circle to play it. I put it behind the net expecting my defender (who was ahead of the forward by a couple of meters) to keep skating. But the moment I went to play the puck he cut back towards the boards expecting me to pass the puck out to him. So I'm way out of my net, my closest defender has started skating away and the forward has an open lane to the puck and an empty net. Anyway I 'sprint' back to my net and dive to the far post where the forward has come around the goal (not in a wrap-around fashion though, about a meter or so from the post) and taken a shot. The puck hit the inside of my blocker and I covered up but I think for the next few minutes I had no trouble keeping focused on the game due to the adrenalin rushing through me.



At one point in the second period I thought since we're not practicing this might be a great opportunity to make use of the ice time. So I started doing some drills, the box, the cross-box, butterfly slides, etc. The other goalie (who still has two games left on his suspension) called out to me and gave me a thumbs-up sign. Then one of our players got the puck on our blue line and skated back towards our goal, all the while carrying the puck between the edge of the spoon and the ice with his stick turned heel-up. Nothing too important but it seemed like poor sportsmanship on his part since the other team was not at our level.



Then a lot seemed to have changed in the third period. I'm not sure if our players were tired (we had 12 players while they had 17) or just getting cocky but the other team started getting more breakaways. I stopped a couple of 1v0s, one 2v0 was supposed to be a goal but the guy on the back post missed a 2 foot wide window between my extended pad and the post and one 1v0 shot went of the crossbar. The other team also kept getting warned about not changing on icing and finally one of our guys went off after icing and they gave us a penalty.

As the game was in the final two minutes, I started thinking about how great it would be to get my first shutout and whether the referees would give me the puck. And 27 seconds before time finished, they got another breakaway 1v0 and scored. I was gutted. Not that getting a shutout matters so much, as I'll take a 2-1 or 3-2 win anyday but more so because I couldn't believe that I had gone 59 minutes and 33 seconds without letting them score, only to let one in as time was running down.

I'll add some pics of the game later tonight. No idea of exact numbers when it comes to shots PS as I'm still trying to get a hold of some official stats.

My pads took a skate and the rip got a little by the time the game was over. Anybody want to send me a tube of Shoo Goo? Either that or I have to find something like it over here, which is a tough call.