New Season
The hockey season is back, and you can follow it all with us right here on BIH.
Stats Centre
We are working on an archive of matches, stats and players from BIH in the past few years.
Ignorance is Bliss
It’s fair to say that they probably procrastinate as much as the rest of us, but I do have a romantic ideal of myself with a completed to-do list and not wishing I hadn’t spent an hour reading about a player I’ve not heard of who may or may not be moving to a team I don’t follow in a league I barely know.
There are the pitfalls that take place in all internet forums such as: competitiveness between posters, trolling and repetitive, tedious posts. It is amazing how quickly you can become accustomed to these irritations and learn to block them out. It’s like the loud clicking of a clock when you’re trying to sleep: once you notice it, it drives you mad, but in time you learn to ignore it.
Sadly, the practice of following a minority sport means it is often necessary to wade through these threads to learn what happened to your team at a game you couldn’t attend. If you are unfortunate enough to want to know what happened in a game featuring the likes of Andre Payette or Brad Voth, the ticking of the clock can reach near ear-splitting volumes.
So, it must be nice to not have that compulsion, to be satisfied by a match report on your team’s website or in next week’s programme. It must be especially nice to completely switch off at the end of a season and turn your attentions to your golf game or county cricket side.
There is very little to be gained, but a lot of sanity to be lost by involving yourself in rumours over the offseason. If you are linked to a particular player who you would love to sign for you, it only sets yourself up for a disappointment you would otherwise have been completely unaware of. If said player does sign, you can have as much joy when finding out once it’s official.
If I went onto a Tottenham Hotspur forum and read that somebody had bumped into Luka Modric in a pub, I would be incredulous. If they told me that he said he was signing Chelsea I wouldn’t believe them for a second. To be honest, I would treat a similar rumour about Jade Galbraith with similar derision, but it is harder to completely dismiss it in the same way. The fact that ice hockey players are infinitely more accessible means that such rumours might be true. They almost always aren’t, but a part of my brain always knows that they could be.
The worst case scenario is to be in the unfortunate position of not knowing the future of your club. I really feel for fans of teams like Newcastle, Edinburgh and Fife who in the past few months have checked in; not to see if they’ve signed a potential superstar, but to see what sort of hockey they may get to watch, if any. Sifting through what people think they know must be unbearable when something so important is at stake.
Imagine trawling through a forum to try and work out if your wife is leaving you based on hearsay and the fact that she was spotted in Nottingham last weekend. You’re far better off waiting for the official word, but how can you leave it when somebody might know something?
Some teams are better at PR than others, but as a general rule, there is not enough coverage to sate this interest of the mildly obsessive or overly concerned fan. Forums are designed to host opinion, but when they are the only place you can go to in the desperate search for facts, madness waits.
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| 12th March 2006 19:00 | ||
5-3 |
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| 12th March 2006 19:00 | ||
4-5 |
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| 12th March 2006 19:00 | ||
1-4 |
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| 12th March 2006 19:00 | ||
4-4 |
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| 11th March 2006 19:00 | ||
2-4 |
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| 11th March 2006 19:00 | ||
| Club | GP | W | L | OL | GF | GA | Pts |
|---|
5-8 |
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| 19th March 2006 19:00 | ||
5-1 |
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| 19th March 2006 19:00 | ||
4-1 |
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| 19th March 2006 19:00 | ||
5-2 |
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| 19th March 2006 19:00 | ||
3-7 |
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| 19th March 2006 19:00 | ||
1-1 |
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| 19th March 2006 19:00 | ||
| Club | GP | W | L | OL | GF | GA | Pts |
|---|
- Adam Walker
- Alex Birch
- Andy Pierce
- Chris Gent
- Christopher Beal
- Craig Simpson
- Dave Simms
- Elliott Stanley
- Gareth Chalmers
- James Broughton
- James Gordon
- Katy Madgwick
- Luke Catterson
- Mark Briggs
- Mark Duell
- Mat Young
- Patrick Smyth
- Promotion
- Russ Morrell
- Seanna Murdock
- Stephen Dowson
- Stewart Roberts
- Tom Forster
- Vicki Smart
- William Lyon
