The photographer with the highly phallic lens who was taking lots of photos, works for this site:

http://www.seenindunedin.co.nz/

I spoke to him and he said the photos will be up in the next day.

I think you have the score wrong on the main page Ryan. I thought it was 6-6 at the end of ordinary time, with 7-6 after sudden death.

An interesting game, and most importantly, it was a pretty good spectacle for the crowd, and both teams took it very seriously, but there was very little silly stuff.

Big ups for Michael for agreeing to referee it when our more experienced outside referee fell through. None of us wanted to do it, and he got through a really tough last period, when he was under a lot of pressure from both teams. At one stage I had to physically push away some Canterbury players who wouldn’t leave us alone to talk about the last second Dunedin goal.

Canterbury brought down a good team and were evenly matched with Dunedin. I thought Dunedin played fairly well as a team, Canterbury relied a bit more on individuals. Both teams played shorthanded a fair bit – Dunedin particularly in the first period, Canterbury in the final period. Those two parts of the game were probably the difference in the game – Canterbury scored on the powerplay and held even with Dunedin when they looked like they might run away with it early, and then scored short-handed – a double sequence of 3 on 5 and 4 on 5 – that moved them from 5-4 down to 6-5 ahead. Dunedin would have really been spewing about those two goals – they had the game at that point and let Canterbury back in front.

The final minute was exciting to say the least. Dunedin were a man up and pulled their goalie and were full-on on attack. Faceoff with 12.30 seconds to go and one missed shot, got it back in front and buried the puck in the net from up close. Was it before the hooter? I’ve heard a bit from Dunedin that it was, and a bit from Canterbury that it wasn’t. I don’t know – I looked straight up at the clock after the goal and it was 0.00 when I looked, but if it turned over in the half a second that I looked up there… I can’t say. Anyway, we went to extra time, but it didn’t last long as Canterbury got a quick goal – that number 12, gee he’s good one-on-one.

Michael can provide a better idea of what happened with the disallowed goal in that third period. What I saw was a delayed penalty against Canterbury, and a Canterbury player touched the puck, sending it back in. I looked to Michael to see if he was going to blow it up, and he was looking at Hodge in a pileup with a couple of Canterbury guys. Canterbury got the puck back again a few seconds later and shot on the open net, as Toby had gone to the bench for the extra skater. I presume Michael had been going to award a penalty, but had changed his mind. I don’t know what should be done in that case, but just dropping the arm wasn’t fair, and I think not awarding the goal was a fair result. Things got really hard for officialing from that point on, and at one stage (when Joe got hit on the offensive blue line) I thought things might get out of control. Both teams played harder and angrier, but I don’t think it got too bad.

It was an exciting game to be involved with. I know I missed a couple of calls, I felt a bit distracted by it being a big game, and in the last period, trying to support a referee who was under a lot of pressure in a close, big game, and not concentrating enough on my job. Though I appreciated the Dunedin team very loudly from the bench pointing out that they had too many men on the ice – next time try and get the player off quietly guys, you might get away with it!

And all I got for it was a bag of moros. I don’t even like moros!