Hats off

I've seen hat-tricks scored before in soccer and in field hockey but never before have I seen a hat-trick goal which is followed by spectators throwing their hats onto the playing surface.

Well, until now.

Last night Ryan Nugent-Hopkins put three past Robert Luongo and the fans reacted by chucking their own hats onto the ice. While I thought it was a tad bizarre at first it was also kind of fantastic - it's finding out about these quaint traditions that makes watching a different sport even more endearing. I don't think it's something that would happen in soccer - firstly because us English are far too tight to throw our own hats away (is there some poor guy who has to collect the hats and return them to their owners?) and secondly because if one of the hats struck a player they'd go down like they'd been shot in the face. We've all seen THAT Rivaldo video on YouTube - if not go check it out. You'll probably find it by googling 'Rivaldo' and 'Cheat'.

So that's one thing I've enjoyed about NHL this week, even if it did somewhat interfere with play. Last night Vancouver completed their four-game road trip with a win at the Oilers and are now 2-1-2 for the season (check me out using the stats). Exactly the same start as last season I'm told and a run which has seen them face the Red Wings, Penguins and Flyers - all expected to make the post-season. Having watched a few games now I've started to form a few opinions on certain players. Two of my favourites thus far are Keith Ballard and Cody Hodgson. Ballard, because he seems like a battler, scored a classy goal in the season opener and made Darcy Horichuk eat his words to the press by sticking him on the floor after five seconds. Hodgson meanwhile is an exciting prospect who I understand has had a slow start to his career with the Canucks, suffering from injury and spending time out at an affiliate. He certainly doesn't look out of place on the ice now and will hopefully play a big part as the season progresses.

Another player it is impossible to notice is Robert Luongo, mainly because whenever the Canucks are playing he's trending on Twitter. There are two obvious camps, the 'LUONGO MUST DIE' cyber warriors, and the 'hey, lay off Lou' supporters. It's obviously early in the season and even I can tell he's had a couple of moments - there's been a few times when he's on his belly and does resemble a beached whale. However it is way too early in the season to not be backing a goalie who, so I believe, performed excellently during last year's regular season even if he did lose form in the seven-game Stanley Cup series against the Bruins. I was pleased he was involved in his first win in Edmonton, hopefully that will instill some confidence and lead to some of the haters backing down. Or at least waiting until a month into the season before calling for his head!

The European Blackout of the NHL has finally lifted, although the network which has the rights in the UK is Premier Sports - which I've never heard of, doesn't come under my regular 'Sports' package and costs £8 a month extra. Early reviews of their coverage are pretty poor so I'm thinking I'm going to stick with catching up with games after they happen - seeing as I'm sleeping while most of the games are going on anyway. You have to think the NHL kind of missed the point by staging a couple of games in Europe at the start of the season but failed to televise them to anyone in Europe. Whether the blame lies with AMI/Medge who bought the rights or the NHL itself for choosing them to sell to is one of opinion, but I would much prefer to get my fix via ESPN, Sky Sports or one of our free to air terrestrial channels who have a fair bit more experience of sports broadcasting. It would appear that the ridiculousness of TV rights is one thing soccer and hockey have in common!

Road trip

One of the most confusing things for a new NHL fan to get their head around has got to be the structure of the league and trying to understand how the divisions and conferences work. It's doubly hard when you're used to watching a sports league where each team plays each other just twice a season, home and away. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

Anyway I think I have now worked out that the Canucks sit in the North West Division and are part of the Western Conference and that they play a phenomenal 82 regular season games. 82! And that doesn't even include the post-season. To me that's an incredible amount of action and it makes the footballer's moans about playing too many games in this country seem pretty ludicrous.

With playing so many games comes another unknown to this new, naive fan - road trips. In most British sports teams play no more than two away games in a row at any one time and for the majority of the season they play home, away, home, away and so on. I guess that with a country the size of the US it makes sense to go to an area of the country and get a whole host of fixtures done. One unanswered question I do have is around away fans, as far as I can see fans don't travel to away games, or perhaps don't during this early stage of the season. This may be something that I'll work out with time (or after asking a load of embarrassing questions on a message board). Either way the crowd at the Canuck's latest game seemed pretty thin - but I'll put that down to the Blue Jackets fans putting on a poor show.

Back on the ice the Canucks have begun a four-game road trip of their own and they've started it off with their first win of the season. I've already found that stats make up a big part of this game and in the build up to this match I learned that Vancouver had beaten their opponents four times out of four last season. So when they went behind twice in the first two periods I felt as though my will for the Canucks to win was somehow bringing the side down, like there was some kind of Karmic force looking down and shouting 'hey kid, you don't know anything about this game and you don't deserve to support a winning team'.

Fortunately that wasn't the case and for the second time this season Vancouver staged a fight back, only this time they secured a 3-2 victory to get this particular road trip off on the right foot. I'm going to reserve more in depth analysis until I can a) remember more than four of the players name, b) have some idea of what makes a good play/performance and c) work out what 'the slot' is!

New beginnings

October 8^th 2011 may not be remembered for any startling world events, sporting achievements or even celebrity weddings (Paul McCartney's third nuptials aside), but it did mark a very different Saturday for me.

Having ignored the previous evening's England match, I didn't seek out highlights or even reach for the papers for a match report of Wayne Rooney's latest debacle. Instead I sat myself down on the sofa and watched my first ever NHL game. But hold on a minute, I'm probably getting ahead of myself here - so here's some background on how I ended up snubbing our 'national game' for a sport I know very little about that takes place in a country that's thousands of miles away...

I've long been a football fan, or soccer to those of you reading on the other side of the Atlantic, but in recent years my love of the game has dwindled. With every passing year the Premier League becomes less about fans and community and more about money, money, money. As a Portsmouth fan I've seen how that can make and break a club and I've also seen that there's no way to success without massive overspending.

I have watched Portsmouth home and away more times than I'd like to admit over the last 10/15 years and I've steadily witnessed players becoming more and more disassociated with the clubs they represent. It's hardly surprising, how can the man on the street possibly relate to a teenager or young twenty-something earning £200,000 a week, especially when it costs £38 a time to go and watch them play. On top of that there is an extremely rich vein of corruption running through the game right to the top of the 'brains' that are supposed to be running it.

The prospect of watching another Premier League season contested between the three richest teams just did not appeal and with Portsmouth languishing back in the second tier I reached breaking point.

So I looked for something different - rugby has never interested me and cricket is out of season. That led me to look at American sports, I know little of any and any knowledge I do have is largely based on playing computer games. NFL has never really appealed and while I enjoyed a SF Giants game on a recent trip to California it just went on too long to be a realistic sport that I could watch regularly. That left basketball or ice hockey - there could be only one choice.

For some reason I've always liked the idea of following the NHL. I haven't watched an awful lot in the past other than the odd fight video on YouTube, but something drew me to it. I've got a basic understanding of the rules having played a lot of the demo of NHL '99 on a very old PC at a friend's house. I also like the speed of the game and of course the physical side which we don't see in too many sports over here.

Having chosen my sport I made the conscious decision to pick a team before the season started. Seeing as I won't be getting to any games in the flesh I figured it'd be easiest to pick one team to follow. I looked at the Washington Capitals and the Detroit Red Wings (the two teams that appeared in that NHL '99 demo), but the Capitals just weren't right and the Red Wings have way too much red in their kit for a Portsmouth fan to get behind. I eventually narrowed it down to the two cities that I've visited in North America that have franchises, the Vancouver Canucks or the LA Kings. From there it was an easy choice, I didn't particularly like LA while Vancouver remains one of the nicest cities I've been to. That and my brother lived there for a time so that gave it some extra pull.

So armed with my laptop and Wikipedia I settled down for the season opener against the Penguins and it was something of a solid start to my new found fandom. Despite being behind for much of the match the Canucks pulled out a 3-3 draw, going down in a shootout but still notching their first point of the season. I'm well aware that there are many terms and statistics I'm yet to get my head round but until now I'd never watched a match from beginning to end - it's a start!

So there you have it, I'm going to try and record my views on the season on this blog and through twitter and perhaps this disillusioned sports fan can find new love for a team who play their home games some 4,500 miles away.

Go Canucks!