Business As Usual, Player Routines, a Friend's Achievement and a Tense Ending!

This past Sunday saw the Milton Keynes Lightning come to the Altrincham Ice Dome, boosted by the recent addition of Blaz Emersic, one of the best players in the league (in my humble opinion!) Sunday also saw the return of Helena, complete with her hip sitting right where it should, which meant that for me it was a return to business as usual with the camera!

Shooting the warm-up alongside Lauren Freeman gave me more chances to experiment with the wide-angle lens, with some pleasing results. One of the benefits of shooting the warm up every week is that before too long you learn the routines of some of the players, you learn that repetition is the key, and that at some points you can pretty much guarantee where a player will be. For example, Stephen Fone will always do some leg stretches right in front of one of the doorways to the Phoenix bench, which meant that I was able to open the door, crouch down, and get this shot:



As well as Foney's routine, another player who can be counted on to do the same thing every game is Curtis Huppe. Without even asking him, I know that one of Curtis' superstitions is to be the last Phoenix player to leave the ice at the end of warm-up, and he will do this after taking a shot into the empty net, after standing in front of one end of the bench. This is why if you look through many of my Phoenix albums on Flickr, you'll see shots like this one:



I swear, taking a shot of Curtis is becoming as much of a superstition as Curtis taking a shot on the goal!

This past Sunday also saw a departure from the norm with the match night programme. Instead of the usual graphic design on the front cover, we were treating to a rather nice portrait shot of Greg Wood, and the shot was the handiwork of fellow Phoenix photographer (and all-round nice lass) Lauren Freeman:



Getting a shot onto the cover is a heck of an achievement, and I am incredibly proud of Lauren - you go girl! Nice work!

The game itself looked like it was going to be a bit of a slaughter once we'd run up a 4-0 scoreline, but the Lightning aren't a team to be taken lightly. Suffice to say that a total of five goals and a couple of bouts of handbags later, the Phoenix scraped through with a 5-4 win. Normally a win is a cause for celebration, but when I went down to the ice at the end of the game to get some shots, the mood down there was somewhat subdued. None of the players seemed to be in the right frame of mind for the usual levels of happiness and relief that follow a win, and in my opinion that mood was written all over their faces. I got this shot of Curtis Huppe at the time of the Man Of The Match presentations:



When you win a game and still look that unsettled, you know it was a heck of a game!

Link to the Flickr album of the game: Phoenix v Lightning