Individual News
22nd of October 2009
From a coaching point of view, every coach will be infuriated with refereeing decisions at some point this season. It won’t be so much about bad calls or missed calls; it will be more about the timing of penalties called or the consistency of what penalties are given by each referee.
Sunday night in Manchester the odd man situations were 7 to 0 in the Phoenix favour. In what was a clean game of hockey, this was extremely surprising. On a different night, in a different city, with a different referee many of those ‘infractions’ would not have been assessed as penalties, but that’s hockey. It’s really frustrating but it happens in a multitude of sports. Having said that, there is no excuse for having too many imports on the ice.
The timing of our penalties contributed to our loss. The Phoenix scored on a 5 on 3 with less than 3 minutes to go to tie the game. In OT we were assessed a slashing penalty which led to another goal conceded whilst killing a penalty. If the player actually slashed an opponent then I would hope that the referee would call it on every occasion. But if a player lightly taps an opponent’s stick, I would hope that during the latter stages of a game the referee would let it go. I would imagine that every coach in this League would plead for the referees to let the teams settle the outcome and call the obvious penalties only.
Despite being shorthanded for a substantial part of the game, we were in the lead until the last three minutes when Manchester tied the game to take it in to OT. Our guys battled hard but it wasn’t meant to be. Our job now is to focus on our next two games.
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Article published courtesy of the Basingstoke Gazette, Thursday 22nd October 2009.
Sunday night in Manchester the odd man situations were 7 to 0 in the Phoenix favour. In what was a clean game of hockey, this was extremely surprising. On a different night, in a different city, with a different referee many of those ‘infractions’ would not have been assessed as penalties, but that’s hockey. It’s really frustrating but it happens in a multitude of sports. Having said that, there is no excuse for having too many imports on the ice.
The timing of our penalties contributed to our loss. The Phoenix scored on a 5 on 3 with less than 3 minutes to go to tie the game. In OT we were assessed a slashing penalty which led to another goal conceded whilst killing a penalty. If the player actually slashed an opponent then I would hope that the referee would call it on every occasion. But if a player lightly taps an opponent’s stick, I would hope that during the latter stages of a game the referee would let it go. I would imagine that every coach in this League would plead for the referees to let the teams settle the outcome and call the obvious penalties only.
Despite being shorthanded for a substantial part of the game, we were in the lead until the last three minutes when Manchester tied the game to take it in to OT. Our guys battled hard but it wasn’t meant to be. Our job now is to focus on our next two games.
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Article published courtesy of the Basingstoke Gazette, Thursday 22nd October 2009.