I could have saved the money for the Eurosport subscription, I guess. Because they only show a very few games live and some more as a re-run. Complete, but not live. The quality of the web broadcast is ok, but not good. Not as good as the videos shown at TSN. At the moment it looks like TSN has videos of all the games. Wow, I have to check out the first game of the German team, in which they were defeated by the US.
Anyway, earlier today I watched CAN – CZE on Eurosport. What a great first goal from John Taveres in the final seconds of the first period. And the perfomance of both teams during the whole game as well. It was a delight to see this, after witnessing a rather mediocre hockey game last night. And it makes me slightly jealous. Why don’t I see something like this on the ice, when my hockey team plays? Highlights (all goals) can be watched in this clip at TSN.
I was looking at the official photos of last night’s hockey game and when I saw some of them I knew I had to post them here as well. Because last night we saw the most vain referee in the history of German hockey. Well at least he was the most vain I have seen yet. We were sitting right behind the photographers and whenever he was in their line of view to start the game again, he posed and smiled for their cameras. After the first few times it got really pathetic and so embarassing. Here is one of the photos of him…
Among these official photos there also are a few of one of my favourite players: former Cologne, now Iserlohn defense player Paul Traynor. He punched a Cologne player who was already lying on the ice, which was unneccessarily and deserved a 2 minute penalty. Paul started arguing with the linesman and got mad and argued some more and got a 10 minute misconduct. If I were the referee I probably would have given him an additional 10 minutes (if that is even possible) for his attempts to demolish the penalty box *g*. Anyway, some photographers managed to capture some of the dispute as well…
I spent the afternoon looking for and buying a frame and some special paper as background for the photo for the Traynor photo Bro3 got me a few weeks ago. Bro3 also had to trim the sheet of paper for the frame (I would probably have messed that up), but now the photo is up on my kitchen wall, across the door, so it’s the first thing I see in the morning. And he looks nicer when he is wearing his Team Canada jersey and more important when he isn’t pissed off :-)
I’ll be spending the day tomorrow in Cologne, having breakfast/brunch with some hockey friends and then we’ll go and watch the game and keep our fingers crossed that it won’t be as bad as we are afraid it will be. At least we’ll be watching it together, which doesn’t happen that often anymore. One of us is working in Finland and just back in Germany occassionally. Some others became parents in the spring and thus always have to find a babysitter and even the rest of us have various other things that takes up some of our free time. But we usually try to get together for the game after christmas and I’m really looking forward to it tomorrow.
In the evening I will be at yet another hockey event, which will probably be even much more fun than seeing the professionals playing hockey at the moment. 18 coworker of Bro2, Bro2 and Bro3 will be playing hockey. There is a hockey rink you can rent for an hour and you can also rent hockey gear for huge groups like these. The fun part is that I guess most of the guys have never played hockey before or haven’t been ice skating in a while. Ice-skating is just not a common pasttime in (this part of) Germany.
I know Bro3 hasn’t been on skates for more than 15 years and even back then is was just for one afternoon. Bro2 says he has been skating during some ski-vacation a few years ago. But all in all they both haven’t been skating more than a couple of times in their life. So they actually don’t have any idea what they will be doing. It’s going to be so much fun to watch :-)