The XXIII Winter Olympics: Day 4

So, Football on steroids.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time watching Hockey, many, many Rangers games when they were very, very bad. I even know what the Blue Lines are for, no I won’t bore you at this point- maybe later. I’ll tell you instead what the problem with Pro Hockey is- too many players in too small a space and unregulated violence. Maybe it’s different now, I haven’t followed it in years.

After I gave up on that I took up with the International version for a while, it has the virtue of having lots of room and, at the time, it was a little like Women’s Basketball with a premium on stick handling and passing.

Then they let the NHL Players in and it’s never been the same since.

The problem is that the brutal game works. Goalies are so padded there’s not much Net to work with and unless you can fake them out of their skates (rare now, they’re mostly very good) there is no choice except to dump it right in front of the Crease, grind it out, and hope for a lucky bounce.

The USA Ladies didn’t play enough like that today. I’m tempted to sic Geno Auriema on them. While they had overwhelming puck control in the first period Finland scored one of those “lucky” goals right at the end and it took them most of the second period to get the lead back. The empty netter at the end of the game was meaningless.

We’ll see how that works out going forward. The real competition, as always, is going to be Russia and Canada though Russia didn’t look very good today losing to Canada 5 – 0. They play the same games, so, sport has changed.

Norway survived a tiebreaker against China that managed to claw their way back into the hunt in Mixed Doubles. It will likely be Norway and Russia in the consolation game and Canada and Switzerland for the Gold.

Monday